Ideal controls for wing rig?

Hi guys,

I’m doing a rig that includes wings, just wondering what the best controls to add are, I haven’t really animated many winged things before so I don’t have too much of an idea of what to add. I have included a diagram of what I have so far.

The controls are an IK controller at the top of the wing which rotates the wing as well, and 3 controllers which allow for ‘cupping’ of the wing. I am not sure if a single control might be better than the 3 , but I thought they might have more control of individual parts of the wing.

I’d like to hear anyone else’s thoughts or experience with wing rigging :slight_smile:

http://www.paulneale.com/technical/bellaSara/bellaSara.htm this might give you some ideas also.

I really would not bother with IK for the first two bones and let it all be FK with an Isolation node above the controls so the FK is independent form the body.

Find some bird reference on youtube and check out what types of shapes your rig needs to get and keep it as simple as you can.

edit - Brad beat me to the link as I was typing this post ;p

I haven’t had any experience rigging a wing yet, but I’ve always been a fan of the wing rig that Paul Neale has up on his site at. http://www.paulneale.com/technical/bellaSara/bellaSara.htm

It should at the least provide a good look at the type of control you can get over a wing, and the videos there should help show the placement and kind of controls he used to create it. Even though he’s done a wing with individual feather geometry I think the principles of how he’s controlling it are still applicable.

hehe, sorry Micah.

here is a great wing reference video that I had found a while back

Another one, maya based cartoon rig

for a rig tool and wing example , tutorials and scripts for feathers check out Mfeather

That should be enough for you to get your rigging plan worked out.

I’ve just finished a rig for a paper crane. The wing i came up with was FK with blendable dynamics driven by the rotation of the first FK bone in the hierarchy. I blend between controllers that have an adjustable lag (time offset) and controllers that have no lag at all(normal FK) This makes the wings very posable and still flap naturally. The rig has no feathers but origami valley/mountain folds instead. Like the folds, the feathers would probably interpolate their positions/rotations from the main FK bones and have bend modifiers on whose angles would be driven by the appropriate laggy rotations.
There is no sine wave flap frequency controling the lag in frames so the lag parameter needs to adjusted in respect to the keyed rotations of the topmost bone. This is still way faster to animate/pose accurately than controlling the flapping with a single flap frequency parameter.
Its pretty fast too because i omitted the extra bones normally found in a blendable control system(think FK/IK blend). The FK bones have their rotation controllers instanced onto control objects thus eliminating the possibility of keying the wrong controllers. I was thinking of making a 2d controller object with a bezier curve to adjust the flap force distribution down the bone hierarchy, so i could blend between vigorous and gentle flapping. however I settled for a single flap multiplying value which works nicely for our needs.
All of this was inspired by the awesome rig at http://www.characteranimator.com/movies/reel_tech_02wave.wmv
Hope this makes sense or even helps!

Oh yeah, that rig is really fun, and a great example of taking animation concepts and having it inform the rig function vs. just making rig features.

Resh, any chance of getting a JING screen capture of your rig, minus the mesh if you can’t show it… would be cool to see what you created off that inspiration video.

Here you go, as long as you cant guess the client its ok! I’m pretty sure you cant… JING would have possibly compromised the nda with paths and all visible in the screen cap. So it’s just a really dirty 5min test liftoff animation with pretty much all of the controls in use. Its the high res mesh so dont mind the fps, but i get 25+fps while in an optimized animation scene state without skinwraps and such.
As a sidenote in the folder that .mov is in you can also find my tedious and laborious efforts at an animatable folding origami crane i made as a personal project in 2007. Since i don’t want to hijack this thread and since the rig is such a hack i wont go into it, but i will say it’s a singular rig with no changing of rigs or geometry in between folding states(visilibity swap)… which is pretty much the only good thing. Origami is some serious mindfuck riggingwise.
progress is being made though

ah cool, looks like it worked out really nicely. Thanks for sharing that.

“Origami is some serious mindfuck riggingwise” I think this should be a new TechArt slogan:)

That’s pretty awesome work man.

Here is a great post as a follow up on wing rigging, wing animation.

http://www.brendanbody.co.uk/flight_tutorial/index.html

Great link bclark! I enjoyed reading that. Maybe we should try and expand this thread to rigging for flight…
I once did a butterfly rig and stumbled upon this cool study called “Flow visualization of butterfly aerodynamic mechanisms”. The same site also has the equivalent study on dragonflies Nowadays I consider Butterflies the ninjas of flight!
More links:
Animal Flight Group (Cambridge)
Animal Flight Group (Oxford)
Journal of Experimental Biology (A lot of animal kinematics here)

I wanna rig a bird sooooo bad. I been looking for an awesome bird model since I graduated. :(:

[QUOTE=resh;7671]
All of this was inspired by the awesome rig at http://www.characteranimator.com/movies/reel_tech_02wave.wmv
Hope this makes sense or even helps![/QUOTE]

Wow, this is great, any more information on how he got this overlapping secondary motion?