Wing + Feathers

[JeT]

does the wing need to fold up? or just flap?

either way, if its going to fold up, you might want to concider swapping models, as from experience it can get messy. bird feathers are amazing, and when they fold up its almost impossible to simulate! ( I'm sure someone can do it, i couldn't be bothered last time though! )

Anyway, you can create the wing bones first, setting up the ik and everything for testing, and then have the feather objects linked to the appropriate wing bones

(you might only need 3 or 4 wing bones, but if you want nice round flapping during flight, then more should be added )

you can then created lookat targets for the feathers to have some general control over the direction of the feathers. You'll need some control here because when the wing outstreaches, the feathers can point out.

You might also want to set up some wire parimetre, existing between the main wing IK solver and a bend modifer on the feathers (create multiple instances of feather or copy / paste instanced bend modifer onto all feathers) This will allow more control for wind etc ( you might want different ones for different feathers, so they dont all bend at once. You could even have one bend modifier on all the feathers, and then have a volume select modifer and animate the selection control object with a noise modifier or something like that to make it nice and random )

The bird characters on Finding Nemo look like they've got nice wings too so check them out if you're after a better understanding of the workings of it all.

Theres lots of things you can do. I know blizzard released somewhat of a tutorial for their warcraft 3 bird (crow or raven whatever it was) and they've got loads of reference images and a good explanation of it all. Not sure if they go into the animation side of it though, and I dont have a link! sorry couldn't find it.

[MCage]

NO way! :'(

The difficult part is the modelling one,
i don't know how to model the wing, and the feathers..

I have tryed using advanced painter script, but with no good results..

Hany idea on how to model the wing, and on how to place the feathers?

Thanks :'(

[yoni-cohen]

the qulity of your work will be defined by skill but 50% will be the qulity of your reference

[heavyness]

i know over at 3dluvr.com they interviewed the guy from blizzard who did one of the 1st Warcraft3 cinematics [the one with the crow]. he does go in-depth about how he created the feathers and animated them.

sorry, can't find the story, maybe you'll have better luck.

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