Softbodies on wings.

[rhankins]

One way to do it would be to create a lattice deformer for the vertices in question. Then turn the lattice into a softbody to move dynamically. Create springs to hold it together and adjust the deformation weights on the lattice near the ends to get smooth deformation with the rest of the wing.

[WhiteRabbitObj]

What rhankins ought to work or you could also make the membrane part a softbody, use springs obviously, and then paint weights on it. Make the original a goal and make the center of the soft wings have a lower goalweight than the outer part.

I tried to do this same thing over the summer but I got frustrated making the wing geometry (it was summer after all) and gave up shortly. So this will be interesting. Painting the weights will be something you'll have to experiment with a lot to get it right I should think and probably you don't want a goalPP of less than .5 on any part of the wing, though I suppose it depends on how flappy the wing should be. I think the lattice idea is a good one also because you will get smooth deformation, so whichever seems easiest or gives you the best results, go for it.

[SirCharles]

Ok, that is all great info, but I am also looking for info here to help me learn how to use the tools you guys are talking about...I have never used dynamics in Maya so I am a little lost. I am primarily an animator and rigger. So springs and how to actually apply the soft bodies to a lattice are a little foreign to me. Do you know where I can find a tutorial that would show me how to use these tools?

[SirCharles]

Comeon guys...someone has to have done this before in Maya or can point me at a tutorial that at least explains how to use the effects in Maya! I have been messing with it and looking in the help but I am not getting anywhere fast...Can someone PLEASE help me???

I figure I have to learn how to use softbodies and apply fields to the softbodies, and then use springs to control them...that much I have gotten, but I cant seem to get springs to work. At least I cant get them to do what I thought they were supposed to do. And I cant figure out how to pin down some verts on a mesh so that it acts as tho it has no softbodies applied to it while others on the same mesh do have softbodies on them.

HELP ME OBI-WAN KENOBI!!! YOUR MY ONLY HOPE!!!

[WhiteRabbitObj]

I don't know why you chose to attempt this effect when you don't know softbodies, because it is pretty advanced. Regardless of that, you apply springs to the particles. The position the springs are applied in they will want to return to. Springs have damping and stiffness. They do exactly what they sound like but stiffness is what is more useful on some levels. Stiffness you will change large amounts generally, the default is 5 but you may want to set it to 100 or even 500. Damping you want to stay low, a number greater than 5 probably has no use and between 0 and 2 is what I have used. When you up either of these attributes you run the risk of exploding your geometry. If this happens you need to go to the solvers tab and find the option that has "use particle oversampling" or whatever it's called, it's something similar. Turn this to 2 or 3 or however high you need to turn it to get the correct results. However, this increases calculation time multiplicitively. An oversampling rate of 2 requires maya to calculate half frames, so frame 1, frame 1.5, frame 2, etc. 3 is third frames and so on. I read someone the other day using an oversampling of 10 for something he was doing but that's crazy, hopefully you never need to go that high, and with wings I see no reason you'd want to. Springs are a way of getting the softbody particles to interact with each other. When you create them your best bet is to change from min/max to wireframe and set the walk-length to 2. This will tell maya to connect each particle to the 8 particles around it with one spring. The higher the stiffness, the more ripples in your object you will get as the energy is passed throughout the object. The higher the damping, the less the energy will travel and retain inertia. So, what else.

To get only certain parts of the geometry to be soft you need to use the Paint Softbody Weights Tool in the softbodies tab. It works the same as painting joint weights for rigging. What you want to do is on your particles options, set the Goal Weight to 1. When you paint you will be painting goalPP, goalPP and goal weight multiply each other so by setting the weight to 1 and then just modifying the goalPP you can control it better. When painting, white is 1 and black is 0, the darker parts are more soft. Another way to change the goalPP is to go into component selection mode, turn off all selections and then turn on particle selection. Select particles however many you want at a time and open the component editor. Click on the particles tab and scroll over, you can manually drag-highlight and change all the selected particles' goalPP at once to an exact amount. This might be difficult if the particles you need are not in a straight line. But you can use either method or combine them.

Lastly, applying a softbody to a lattice is exactly the same as to a piece of geometry except for one crucial part: you need to be absolutely sure to make the original soft, and not the copy soft, because the original lattice is what is connected to the geometry. This goes for your bound geometry as well obviously, since the original is what is bound. I was thinking about this earlier today before I read your post and I realized that if the original bound geometry is made soft, does the copy need to be bound so the goal object is in place correctly? To that, I have no answer right now as I have no messed with it yet.

Hope this helps. It's 4:30am here so if it's fragmented, it's because its late and also because there is so much info to go over. Like I said, you chose a more advanced effect to go over so no small tutorial is going to show you what you need, but just give you the basic knowledge to put it together yourself.

[SirCharles]

Hey WhiteRabbit, thanks for the post. That will help alot. To answer your questions, I picked this effect because I have no choice. This is the effect that needs to be done for me to do the character I am doing. Secondly, I may not have made myself clear earlier. While the final plan is to do the softbodies on a bat-like wing, I wasn't ever nessecarily looking for a tutorial that did "exactly" that. I was asking for tutorials that involved softbodies and how to use them. Period. So if anyone has any tutorials that will help me learn the basics of soft bodies those are MORE than welcome!!! I need any bit of info I can get. Trying to learn it with the Maya Help info is about useless.

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