Rigged Low Poly Bird Improvement
polycounter lvl 4
I'd like to share a personal project I started recently.
I haven't done much animation before, especially skin deformations, so I figured I would use this thread to explain my thought process, ask questions, and hopefully get feedback.
I wanted to model a bird, with enough geometry to allow for extreme deformations ( folding wings ), but simple enough to be used in a mobile game.
Okay so my biggest question was how to approach the feathers?
Model and rig each feather individually? This would allow for greater control during animation, but the rigging process is very tedious, and requires a lot of fine tuning.
This method seemed a little too complicated for my needs, so I decided to model the whole wing as one object and use controls only on the most critical joints of the wing.
There is a drawback though I am really concerned about with this method: UV stretching.
WIP:
REFS:
To be continued...
I haven't done much animation before, especially skin deformations, so I figured I would use this thread to explain my thought process, ask questions, and hopefully get feedback.
I wanted to model a bird, with enough geometry to allow for extreme deformations ( folding wings ), but simple enough to be used in a mobile game.
Okay so my biggest question was how to approach the feathers?
Model and rig each feather individually? This would allow for greater control during animation, but the rigging process is very tedious, and requires a lot of fine tuning.
This method seemed a little too complicated for my needs, so I decided to model the whole wing as one object and use controls only on the most critical joints of the wing.
There is a drawback though I am really concerned about with this method: UV stretching.
WIP:
REFS:
To be continued...
Replies
I think I've finally settled on a decent wing setup, using this 3dsMax tutorial for reference. Here's what it looks like:
NOTE: Since the wings are symmetrical, I wanted to animate both wings simultaneously by mirroring one side. This would have been pretty straight-forward had I used a CAT / Biped skeleton, but since I created my own rig, I had to either mirror the transformations manually or write a tool to do it. I was already comfortable with Max Creation Graph, so I decided to make a custom animation controller. On the left side, the 2 wing controls, and 9 feather bones are set to mirror the corresponding elements on the right.
I've also made some adjustments to the folded-wing pose, unwrapped the model, and applied a checker texture to it so I could see just how much stretching there is. Here are the UVs.
model
Like the clean rig and like the simple but pleasing aesthetics of the design.
In regards to your animation the flying animation feels really stiff when it's wings are at it's fullest extent. Before they turn down they seem to "pop" and jerk down into the second half of the animation. In other words some of it feels a bit jerky.
@ThatOtherGuy - What you said about the jerky transitions helped a lot, and I think(?) I've fixed most of the popping now.
Also, I totally agree with what you said about the wings feeling "stiff" - still working on this.. I'll probably need an extra joint near the wing tip..