Animating Wings
Hello. This is a very basic tutorial about
animating wings for your creatures. This is just an experiment
I made a while ago, so it isn't a finished scene, but I hope you
find it useful. You
must know how IK chains work before following this tutorial. If you need to learn how to set up IK chains,
please visit my other IK tutorial in the PiXELS:3D
Artists RIng. You'll find the basics about IK chains there.
| First of
all, watch the following Quicktime movie. You'll see that the
wings are nothing but a mesh or a cylinder. In this case I used
a cylinder to give some thickness to the wings. I just scaled
the cylinder down in the Y axis, and it is almost flat. |
|
| After creating the cylinder
I made three IK chains. There's a 'main' IK chain, you can see
it above the wings. I used this IK chain to control the whole
model, to move it forward for example. As this is the main IK
chain, the other two chains and the cylinder itself will be linked
to this chain. |
| Then I created two IK
chains, one for each wing. I linked the parent joint of each
IK chain to one of the joints of the main chain. The cylinder
is also linked to the main chain as I said. Then, in tag mode,
you link each 'wing' to the second joint of the corresponding
IK chain, and change the weight of every V step in such way that
you get a smooth bend when moving the last joint. |
| This is the good part,
and it is really simple. Create a cylinder with only 1 V step
(so you're actually creating just a circle). Now, with the Z
and Y constraints DISABLED, use the push/pull tool to move each
CV of the circle to create the shape that you see at each side
of the wings in the movie above. This will be the path for the
last joint of both wing IK chains. Duplicate the spline you just
created and flip it in the X axis. Move both splines to the right
places as seen in the movie. |
| Now select the last
joint of the left wing and shift-select the left spline. Click
on the path/unpath tool and enter 90 frames. Do the same for
the right wing. Make a pencil test. At this point you'll see
something similar to the movie above, but you will probably need
to adjust your splines in shape and distance related to the wings.
You will need to adjust the curves in the timeline too!!! this
is very important to get realistic motion. Here's a screenshot
of my timeline (the two splines are overlapped): |
 |
Well, that's it. Download my scene
file here: WINGS SCENE FILE (alas2.sit)
I Hope you find it useful
Joel
|