I was wondering if the character object of BIRD comes with an animated flight cycle…can’t seem to find it. If not, does anyone know if there are any tutorials specific to the bird character object, or have any tips on setting up a flight cycle using what’s already provided?
You are correct that there is no “preset” animation on the bird.
In this case you have 2 options. Set up the motion yourself using cmotion, or hand animate a loop.
In the case of cmotion, you would start by dragging the controllers that you want to affect into the cmotion list then apply the various motions.
You only need to do this on one side, and then you can use references in Cmotion to set up the animation on the opposite side.
As far as motion goes…there is a lot going on with a bird…the overlapping motions can be complex.
I would recommend taking a look here: http://www.brendanbody.co.uk/flight_tutorial/index.html
This provides a pretty good break down of the motions within the wing during flight.
Hopefully that helps.
If you are not to sure about the functions of cmotion, be sure to check out Bret’s series on it.
One of the Cineversity Instructors—Josh Johnson—has a work on something like that a while a go. Perhaps he might share something if you PM him. The link shows only the use in a flock.
Based on Patrick’s link you might already found some good reference. To align the “joints” along practical footage is always a good start.
The question is always how detailed you might like to work. I would check as well the CMotion options, no doubt, but perhaps as well XPresso or PoseMorph. If the details are not so important, several positions as child under a Cloner object might work as well (Blend/Formula Effector)
If you google “bird fbx” you might find some options, but some are quite expensive.
It’s a hero bird, up close and personal in a few shots. I have Poser and Interposer Pro, and was hoping to get some good results, but shockingly (or not) Poser doesn’t have a great flight cycle for the bird. I was thinking of just re-rigging it in Cinema 4d (which is a bit outside my wheelhouse) and assumed the bird object would have a flight cycle I could tweak.
But I’m not sure where to start…so I’ve been watching some basic rigging tutorials, and I’m hoping to be able to take a Poser bird model, re-rig with the bird character object, and then replace the wings with the Digital Tutor wings.
Just build the rig, adjust, but don’t bind, then convert the character object.
Delete the wings from the rig and then attach the ones from DT.
Go through and setup your weighting, and then animate.
As soon as you start building your own sections to a rig the presets in the character object would fail anyway, so you would be left animating by hand (keying, or cmotion), or xpresso.
Essentially I rarely keep a character object as a “character object” I almost always convert the rig and then hack and slash to get what I want.
The wing, if detailed, is certainly a complex rig. No question, break it down to the parts and it will look much simpler. If you like to use the prepared rigs in C4D, think of the arms as the wings. The tutorials explains how to adapt the size.
In your link each feather has practically a “joint”, I f I got that correctly. It could lead to the idea to not weight the feathers at all, instead place them in a hierarchy along the joints (inside the hierarchy or outside with constrains perhaps)
All of the joints can be then adjusted with the PoseMorph and animated with it. Think in smaller Units first. Just the wings (arms) then test a single feather. If that works nicely, fill the wings.
(I just notice Patrick was posting as well, perhaps he takes over from now on this thread :o)
Yes, more input—more option (or more confusion? Hehe) OK, here is a simple example. I used the movie clip from Patrick’s link, as I assume “Fair Use for Educational Purposes” is OK and we have the original link here.
More information about that subject is in the Book “The Art and Technique of Matchmoving”/Solutions for the VFX Artists/Erica Hornung/Focal Press, 2010. It is a complete book about manual match-moving of people. Which helps to “match” anything finally. A very nice introduction and so far I can tell, she knows what she is talking about.
I have worked with Poser in the past, and used them for tutorial work as it is easy to illustrate things with these figures. However, you need to check very carefully the mesh that you get from it—before you invest any time in rigging! Seriously.
Which methode you finally chose is a little bit dependent where you feel comfortable in setting it up. In larger studios the idea is of at least two work areas, rigging and animating. Animating means here to have a rig that let you focus on the expression and not how to improve the rig for example.
You’re welcome. I went in 5 frame-steps along the animation. Perhaps not always the fastest way. There are three main methods to get the motion from a movie source:
a) you watch the footage several times to “see” where you have a change of direction or a drastic speed change. There you place your timeline and set keyframes. Check again and refine with some extra keyframes.
b) you go from start to finish in equal steps and hope that your decision is not too far apart (to capture changes) or to small (to make it unmanageable based on too many keys)
c) set on start and end a keyframe for the joints in question, then in the middle. In the resulting two parts, test if there is a change in the middle of each of the two parts, set new ones if, refine it until it fits.
Each methods has some pros and cons. but after a few times you can certainly evaluate which one might be the better one for a given case. Which might be as well useful to decide for each joint newly.
I like to have the lowest amount of keyframes possible, in that way each f-curve is more powerful. (You might know all of that of course, but I write in a forums thread and there I have to be broader.)
The body of the bird works like a counter balance—inertia wise. I have used here just the wing, I assume that the body becomes a “spine” that lifts or lowers the body. It is very nicely explained in the link.
