Falcon

[ignanacho]

I'm animating a falcon, and i need to make it close its wings. Does anybody have any idea?

Thanks

[Cyrenn]

Im not to sure, Im still really new to 3d, This is a suggestion, Could you make morph modifier on you mesh to animate the falcon.

Not sure if that would work though.

[novoAlias]

why not ask here
he seems to know what hes doing

lol beat ya to it jawahar lol

[jawahar]

try animating the gizmo and the bend-effect amount by applying the bend modifier on the wings.
blackwolf:hehe

[ignanacho]

Thanks fpr the replies. What i did was put bones, but still doesn't work really well. The mesh goes a little crazy.

Thanks

[Cyrenn]

Make sure your bones are about the same size of your mesh.

Then move your bones around to see were the mesh goes crazy, then tweek the envolopes around until the mesh fits with the movement of the bones.

[jawahar]

i would just use mesh select on the wings,using soft selection with a high pinch amount, select all the vertices on the mesh u want to move(use soft selection to get a smoother bending while you apply the bend modifier).
in the modifier stack,add a bend modifier above mesh select and then animate the gizmo.
modifier stack heirarchy:
editable poly-mesh smooth-mesh select-bend
.
hope that helps,you could also use bones and paint weights while editing envelopes.

jd

[ColeKindred]

I know blizzard had two seperate sets of wings for the crow in the warcraft 3 movie. They had closed to half way open wings and half way open to all the way open wings. They swaped them out mid movement.

I don't know how often your characters wings will go from all the way open to all the way closed so the above may not be practical for your use.

Are you using Shag to make feathers? Is it cartoony or real? If your not making individual feathers or only the main ones it wont be too bad. otherwise You could make an IK setup with all the feathers connected to individual bones wich are intern connected to the main bones of the wing. but it would take forever. One other thing to try that I havn't tried myself is to link the feathers to the wing with a constraint and animate the mesh underneath with normal bones. In anycase good luck.


BlackWolf thx for the vote of confidence lol.