Rigging a Bird's Foot (Do You Know How To)

Hey Everyone,

So I’ve been trying to rig a vulture character on and off for the last 3 months or so, and I’ve come to a huge problem.

My vulture has talons like every other bird, and I’m trying to figure out how to get the feet to plant on the ground. The basic reverse foot set up doesn’t work since all the talons meet up at the original ankle bone. If anyone has any advice or a tutorial it’d be very appreciated.

I’ve starred into Maya’s screen way too long for any new ideas to pop up in my head.

Thanks for reading!

Turtle127

i think you can just stick with the regular ik joints for the talon control and do a layered controller based constraint on the ik via foot controller. this way the claw stick to the ground and you can still animate the claws using claw controller that was used to constraint or parent of ik! here the foot controller acts as a master parent object.

Thanks for the reply…

Though i’ve never actually put IK handles in the feet before. I am still a beginner, but it sounds like an interesting approach. I just don’t fully get it.

If you want I’d love to learn and have you explain a little more in depth. Though at this point I did figure out a way to make the foot workable for now!

Thanks again.

Another option is to use a simple FK setup under the foot where all the animator has to do to make the toes collapse is to grab all the toe controls and rotate on one axis so they all go.

or you can use a slider approach on the foot controller, but I find the FK style controls feel more natural.