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View Full Version : feathered wing / arm hand combo ... any problems you've encountered?

a3dmonkey
08-14-2003, 06:55 PM
I'm working on a rigging up a feathered wing that will act like a wing and fold next to the characters body while also being able to switch on the fly to become an arm with a hand. I'm looking for any advice on how to go about doing this.

What I've done so far
____________________________________

I started by searching the web for various tuts and then selected the Jackles forge tut as a basis of things and then added extra functionality from there.

If using the setup suggested on the forge page the wing works fine as a wing but seems to break down as an arm setup when you bend at the elbow and twist the forarm / radius and Ulna. This tears a gapping hole in the center of the wing and causes extra interpenetration of feathers across the wing creating render artifacts all over the place as the feathers colide.

I'm working on a solution for this but as I'm figuring this out after a +10 hour day freelancing the works going slowly.

So, I thought to see if any one else here has worked on this type of rig and may have any pointers for what to avoid as well as what works well on this type of rig.

If you have any suggestions please post here or email me at

a3dmonkey@hotmail.com

Thanks,

Michael
:buttrock:
nottoshabi
08-14-2003, 10:54 PM
I'm working on something like this as wee speak so I kinda understand what you are going throw. I have used Stuart Little as a refference. The bird uses its wings as hands wich is really cool and it seems to act really natural. But from my experience you can do both, eather or. But if you still want to try, ad extra joints around the problem areas that do not twist with the wrist and are able to keep the deformations of the wing down.

Hope that helps..:beer:
a3dmonkey
08-15-2003, 02:52 AM
Ahh another on that build the crazy wing kick....

I'll try the extra joints and see where I get with that. Previously I was thinking of attaching the feathers to both joints and using that as a means of keeing the feather placement. I had advanced a lil way in this but not enough to be confident in its successful implimentation.

What I have gotton to work reliably so far are ...

feathers to hand / fingers
controllable feather dynamics with wind
and semi controlled feather interaction and influence.

hmmmm that stuart lil movies been mentioned to me before I remember catching it at Siggraph 2002 and thinking ... OMG how did they do that. Thankx for the suggestion nottoshabi. I have the day off tommorow ( due to NYC power outages... took me 5 hours to walk home, sheesh ) so hopefully I'll make some serious head way tommorrow. Either way I'll post a pic or two of where things are headed.

ciao

Michael


Oh well heres to finding out aye. Good luck there nottoshabi
nottoshabi
08-15-2003, 07:33 PM
That feather dynamic thing sounds great. I have never had verry good luck in dynamics on rigs, since the rigs always had to be imported in scenes that had other dynamics. The rigs always broke, and the dynamics started mixing, oohhh it was a mess.

But I will like to see your final result. :thumbsup:
a3dmonkey
08-20-2003, 07:17 PM
Getting a domain and web host setup today so I should be able to post some movies tommorrow.

I solved the wing splitting problem but have created a new problem with the feather influencing. I need to rethink the feather influence as well as redesigning the hand connection to the wing for smoother movements.

Crossing my fingers on the web site and the wing here,

Michael Ware
3dbiscuit.com ( soon to be )
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