Problems with reparenting bones.

[Kankuran]

Hi! I have a couple of delicate questions. I am in the middle of creating a bird with anime, it is a fairly complex rigging as I am using a lot of feathers.

My problems are with the wings. I would like the feathers to fold togeather at the same time as the the wing fold, and I thought I should be using angle control on the feathers and match them with the motion of the different wing parts. Sound quite logical, but strange things are happening.

So please bare with me on this(:

I have uploaded a very simple wing file - rigged and ready, and my questions are matched with this file.

http://www.goober.nu/AS/WingDummy.zip

Problem1:
First of all I noticed that when I reparent the feathers with the wing, the IK stops working. Why is this?

Problem2:
Example2
As I would like the feathers to fold I used angle control. This works fine with bone1 and its reparented two feathers, but as I use this on the following two wing parts (bone2, bone3) the reparenting seem to screw up the angle control, and the feathers takes bone1 into account aswell. This results in the feathers going all over the place instead of folding nicely.
Example3
When I take away the reparenting control the angle control of the feathers do work, but it becomes a bugger to move the wings in a nice way.

Does anyone understand what I am talking about

Thank you in advance!

[Genete]

Problem 1: IK only works for a continuous chain of bones. If there are more than one branch then the IK solver stops. That's the way it is. If a bone has two children bones who is the one that defines the IK position?

Problem 2:
Example 2: The feathers linked to bone 2 and 3 do its job properly. You've constrained them to rotate -1 times its parent. But remember the parent rotation is RELATIVE to its parent. So although bone 2 were horizontal (a 90 degree counter clock rotation of bone 1) its rotation is 0!! Take a look to its angle value selecting the bone and then selecting the rotate bone tool. I guess that what you want is that all the feathers were parallel regardless the bones1, 2 and 3 angles. To do that you need a script because you cannot combine more than one bone in the constraints

Example3: Yes it is difficult to move those bones not parented.

Don't the the technical problem there. The problem is that you want to do automatically something that can be done normally with other techniques.

For example why don't you do a couple of actions for the feathers to place them completely open and completely closed? just insert the action in the proper place at the proper time. Then just do the animation of the wing bones normally and when it is finished then apply the open/close actions to the feather bones. It could be more time consuming but would produce more realistic and satisfactory results against an automatic wing.

-G

[Kankuran]

Thanks Genete, sorry for the late reply
I have tried to solve it in other ways, there are just so many feathers to keep track of:D

Anyway, this is how far I have come:

Raven flight cycle:
www.goober.nu/journey/forum/Proboard/video/video3.html

/Ola