Can't fudge this

The good thing about drawing is that you can blithely say that your character has a 20m wingspan and still draw them folded up neatly against their backs in the pose everyone expects, which is something similar to my short-armed redo which had a roughly 5m wingspan:

Unfortunately it doesn’t work as well in 3d! After getting the opinions of family and friends I settled on the 7m wingspan. Quadrapop wondered how to keep the feathers off the ground, I incorrectly said I’d investigated and the 5m and 7m wingspans cleared the ground. the 5m ones did easily due to the shortness of the arms. the 7m ones use the same length feathers as the 5m ones but the arms are longer, and I initially folded the feathers down wrongly in my initial super quick test. So when I actually did the proper furling morphs I ran into a slight problem:

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.

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.

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):

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!

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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).

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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.

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Disgruntled

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

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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.

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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.