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Macj
09-13-2004, 05:19 AM
We are currently having difficulties with rigging this character's wings. He needs the ability to fold his wings up, but we have ran into many clipping problems when actually trying to execute such a movement with simple skinning. We are trying to avoid reconstruction of the wing itself, because there is already textures and a displacement map applied. Possible methods we have been thinking about are: Two seperate objects and hiding the visibility transition but we're worried about seams in the mesh; morph targets on top of the skinning but we're thinking that these may be hard to do on a complex mesh such as this because of the "blind" modeling technique that must be used; Maybe turning the mesh into some kind of cloth like surface using softbodies so that the surface folds in on itself as you relax the bones, but we're almost certain that this last option is pure fantasy on our part:) Anyway does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Does anyone have any experience doing folding wings such as this?

http://www.naatch.com/images/600_help4.jpg

http://www.naatch.com/images/600_help6.jpg

http://www.naatch.com/images/600_help5.jpg
seb4d
09-15-2004, 06:52 PM
I would try to extract the skin of the wings into a different object and use cloth to constrain it to the bones.

If you want to paint skin weights, you could create non-renderable objects along the surface of the wings' skin and animate them with constraints or driven keys according to the unfoldment of the wings. Then skin the wings' skin to these objects. Later you can add some dynamics to these objects.

Skinning a wing is not something easy and there are many ways to achieve that.
Good luck and let us know what method you'll choose !
bobzilla
09-16-2004, 02:54 PM
Probably not the most elegant, but how about Spline IK chains across the wings? From "extended finger" across to the next "extended finger".

Never did wings before...just a thought...
Macj
09-16-2004, 10:17 PM
Well it looks like cloth is going to be what we use. We're getting far better results with it than anything else. The built in collision detection really helps with the folds. Not too difficult to setup either. Just seperate the membrane from the mesh and turn it into a cloth object then make the origional mesh a collision object and then apply a mesh constraint. The settings are the picky things. Lots of attributes to tweak to make it work. Our character is scaled fairly small and I don't think that helped things.
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