technonaturalist

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AEfter Ragnarok

Contemplating Avian wing sizing...

I can’t remember how I came about my original calculations but I worked out that a 1.8m tall (because that’s how tall my base model is, no other real reason) Avian should have a 10-12m wingspan. Because I didn’t want to make the wing arms too big (because heavy plus looked stupid past a certain point) I managed to end up with 3m long primaries.

Blender Avian model with 10m wingspan

For comparative purposes one with a 7m wingspan (made the wing arms longer but used the feathers I’d done originally, didn’t zoom in for size comparison):

Avian wing progression

Reasonably weight mapped chicken wings.

Avian Blender model with folded chicken wings

Which I think looks a lot better than the Lightwave model I did five years ago (weight mapping was probably still a work in progress here or at least I hope it was, I can’t remember now):

Lightwave Avian model weightmap wip

And now comes with primary, secondary and tertial flight feathers.

Rig test 2

Error riddled but I’m calling it done so I can move along with other things. Like characters and sets and maybe more paintovers. Least my arm rig works which was the purpose of the exercise!

Calming down

Amazing what turning on the other two lights can do. Base is a bit less annoyed now that we’ve nearly finished a rig test (FINALLY).

Action hero pose

This pose kind of just happened shortly after I animated a “yeah…and…?” type shrug, and it reminded me of all the similar types of poses I’ve seen in movies and various pieces of art around the place, usually where the hero has been beaten to a pulp and is staggering off somewhere or stubbornly staggers back to their feet to eventually kick arse and chew bubble gum.

In other news, the arm rigs seem to work now.

I meant to do that

Base pretending it’s not recovering from a stumble.

I stuffed up the initial walk timing and with the amount of keying I’d done it was easier to just remove them and try again. It’s getting there.

Disgruntled

Screencap of the latest rig test. Base has had enough :)

Hmph

How I felt after falling over problem after problem as Sprat and I bugsquished another site, also representing yet another complete failure at getting to bed before midnight.

Also, folded arms are hard.

Insanorig

My completely unprofessional rig which is probably unusable by anyone else but does the job for me. It’s off-centre from the base (which everything is eventually parented to) because I did some ground stuff directly beforehand. The arms are a bit awkward to position at times as I’m using the targets to control the rotation for the elbows as I can’t seem to get pole targets working on arms for some reason (no problems on legs but legs are just easier). I’ll give it another shot before committing to the rig enough to transfer it to the other two models.

Seriously? Again?

Screencap of Base after mouthing “Seriously again?” (it doesn’t have a voice). I’m trying to work out how to tackle doing bone drivers for the 10 phoneme key shapes I have. They’ll easily fit on the three mouth controllers that I have seeing as I only use one direction for anything but knowing my luck I’ll have a hell of a time remembering what’s what.

Still it may have to happen seeing as bone keys are a lot easier to move than shape key keys (I actually can’t seem to move shape key keys at all for some reason).