Rig Feathers

Maya
1

hey guys

i am currently rigging a cartoon character(bird) with feathers what would the proper way to do that
i have been trying around with follicles i first created follicles on the meah of the wings and then have parented poly planes to these feathers which will then be texture mapped.
it is a cartoon character so its going to have all kinds of animation (squash and strech) etc
i just wanted ideas from u guys out their what woud be a the better way to do that or what precautions should i take if i am following this method.
any kind of help would be appreciated..

                                                       
                                                                        thnx
2

hey is there no one who can forward some ideas?????

3

for wings or body?

for body Inevitably youd need to do some major api work. Anyway give people some time to answer wait a week at lest a week until you get frustrated a post with 0 answers attracts more reads!

Anyway this is not a aone page answer.

4

hey jooja thanks atleast for replying

i was talking about wings any ideas???

5

I posted a link on a tutorial here some time ago (6 to 12 months) detailing the rigging and setup of a pair of wings using the same poly plane technique as you described, one moment...

digging through the crates

..here it is:

http://www.jackals-forge.com/tutor/tut1.html

check it out, might help you along. There are also a ton of threads in the rigging forum here dealing with wings and feathers, so dig in, baby!

Have fun

6

Yes except the flap cycle he sues is a bit off... birds don't flap like that the donwnard might have the effect seen on that video. but tey cant drag the wing up like that or no flight would take place (there has to be no drag drawing wings up otherwise the effect would cancel out the down push and the bird would quite literary stay on ground)

7

Well, I do believe it is a start. First grab the raw mechanics and then start refining, ehem, flapping

8

I'd first gather a bunch of reference to match your bird.
The BBC has a tonne of great video reference online that
you can make use of:
http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/

Once you're ready, the next step is to ensure you get your
joints positioned properly. The shoulder, elbow, and wrist
joints are quite different in birds, and differ in position
from bird to bird.

From there, you can rig your wing quite like an arm. Now,
to the feathers which was your main question. I like to use
bones with expressions. That allows me to set rotations
easily that are based on the rotations of the main bones in
the wing. It's actually quite simple to take the wing bone
rotation, distill it down to the proper rotations for your
feather bones, and multiply it by a scale factor that will
either stretch the feathers further, or compress them in
as the wing reaches out and comes close to the body.

Quick example:

//distal
if (rt_wrist_jnt.rotateZ >= 0)
{
rt_wing_spread_01_jnt.rotateX = rt_wrist_jnt.rotateZ * -.30 ;
}
else
{
rt_wing_spread_01_jnt.rotateX = rt_wrist_jnt.rotateZ * -.60 ;
}