Looks awesome!
One of the things that can contribute to a toy-look is the hard contacts and non-deformable behaviour of the Markers and ground. A small plastic toy would behave similarly when thrown against a marble floor, but large fleshy creatures in the real world do a lot of squishing, as does the ground.
In the next release, you’d have soft contacts to help with this. But in the current release, there are at least 2 things you can try.
- Translate Motion = Soft
- Soft plates on the ground
With soft translate motion on either the entire raptor, or parts of it, you would allow for limbs to squish and stretch. This can help ease the impact onto the ground, making it look (in motion) as though the shapes themselves are the ones squishing.
Although you can’t make the ground soft, you can make the ground dynamic and have the ground try and follow a target ground with some softness, creating the illusion of a soft ground.
It’d then be up to some post-process to restore accurate ground contacts during render, like adding grass or doing an additional cloth-simulation on the ground to match the intersecting parts of your character.
This, in addition to soft translate motion on the limbs:
Now your controllers would have animation on their translate motion, which you may or may not transfer onto your raptor rig. By merely being soft in simulation it will start to behave and feel more soft, even if those translate values aren’t recorded.
Things to tune is the Translate Damping of the raptor, to control the amount of jiggle between limbs, and also damping and density of the ground, to control how deep and how soft the ground should be.
I’d probably also add some detail to the ground; I think the visual of falling and sliding onto a perfectly flat surface also contributes to the toy-feel, as it looks like one big marble floor.
Finally, I’d probably also tune your scene scale; even though it may be at a realistic scale, having things happen faster (larger scene scale) could help make things feel more weighty and less floaty.