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Reaver2k
03-21-2008, 11:30 PM
After hours and hours of suffering and aggrovation, I've finally decided to quit my losses and ask for help.

I have a bird wing I'm trying to rig with feathers that are to seperate out as the wing opens up etc. Now I'm having troubles, trying to combine rigid binding and constraints.

I have two feathers on either side of 10 other feathers constrained with point and orient constraints weighted between them (so when either outer feathers rotate, the others orientate between them) which is working fine. But I'm having huge troubles trying to connect the outer feathers to the bones without these constraints breaking.

When I rigid bind a feather to the bone, and rotate the bone, the other feathers don't flare. I think this is because once a feather is rigid bound to a bone, it is no longer changing its orientation, the bone is. So I'm trying to figure out a way of connecting them without it having a break-down. I got somewhere once, but was having such troubles with what I think is a "Gimble lock" where the feathers were rotating here there and everywhere once it hit a certain rotation, which was no good for me.

Please if anyone has any suggestions or advice, let me know, I'm running out of time and have been tearing my hair out over this for days.

Thank you very much.
Cactus Dan
03-22-2008, 12:34 AM
Howdy,

Well, I've had this tutorial bookmarked for a long time that might be able to help you out: ;)
http://www.jackals-forge.com/tutor/tut1.html

Adios,
Cactus Dan
Reaver2k
03-22-2008, 01:19 AM
Thanks very much for the link. Looks good if a little complicated!

It seems he uses set driven keys to drive the joints into an "open" phase or whatever he needs. Which is good but I really need a fully functioning bird wing, not just to open and close.

Doesn't have to be too complicated! I thought I had it but I just cant figure out a way to link these two feathers to the bones whilst keeping the constraints working! Any clever tips or tricks that I can use to link the two feathers to the bones, but they still rotate when the bones do?
Cactus Dan
03-22-2008, 01:59 AM
Howdy,

Well, I wouldn't know for sure because I rig in Cinema 4D with my own character rigging plugins, but it would stand to reason that if you bind one of the controlling feathers to a joint, that feather's axis wouldn't be moving anymore. The geometry would be deforming, instead.

Have you tried parenting the feather to the joint instead of binding it? Or, is that when you experienced problems with rotations past a certain point?

Adios,
Cactus Dan
tyree
03-22-2008, 05:06 AM
what are using you might want to look into a character animation system there usually built for character and animal animations
Reaver2k
03-24-2008, 12:30 PM
Cactus I hadn't actually thought of that stupidly and it works! Only problem is, my feathers have been flipped the wrong way round? Example in picture shown. Any ideas? I thought offsetting the X rotation would do it, but all of them have different X locals obviously so it didnt work. Tried playing with the offset Y but couldnt find a suitable system to offset them by the right amount.

Any ideas?
Please help! Running out of time!
Cactus Dan
03-24-2008, 01:23 PM
Howdy,

Hmmmm well, I'm not sure about that. As I mentioned, I use my own plugins for rigging (I've coded my own constraints plugin, so they work how I want them to work. ;) ).

But I'm curious if another interpolation type in the orient constraint would fix that, or if you use the parent constraint instead of physically parenting the feather to the joint?

Adios,
Cactus Dan
Reaver2k
03-24-2008, 01:35 PM
Genius! Using the shortest interp worked! Out of curiousity what does this actually mean? Thanks for all your help, you've probably saved me 10 hours fustration!
Cactus Dan
03-24-2008, 01:46 PM
Howdy,

Well, shortest means that it will take the shortest angle from 0º, which would be less than 180º. So for example, if something is at an orientation of 200º in one direction, it is actually 160º in the opposite direction, which would be the shortest angle from 0º. ;)

Adios,
Cactus Dan
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