Moho Forum

I am attempting to duplicate the wing movement on this character, but can't seem to get the bones to work right. Even when the bones are cut and pasted in to the same layer, the angles they take up during the keyframes are wildly divergent from those on the already existing wing. You wouldn't think simply cut&pasting bones would make them take up 180 degree different angles, even though the bone "positions" look the same.

Any suggestions on how to duplicate the wing shown here?



Once I have two wings going through the same basic motions then I can fine tune the wing cycle a bit to add character. The second wing doesn't have to be a mirror of the already existing one, the bones can go the same way and I'll just translate the layer forward a bit (or the points if I must).

Interesting question.

I just recently did the exact same thing. A bird flying. I did exactly what you described, copied and pasted the wing bones that I already key framed then slightly changed the angles and scale so they weren't in exactly the same place. It worked fine.

Are you sure that the TOP bone of the pasted wing is parented to the same bone as the other wing? When I pasted the wing bones, the top bone of the pasted wing was not parented to any bone, and when I played it back the wing was rotated and pointing in the wrong direction. Once I parented the top bone of the pasted wing bones to the same bone as the other one it worked fine.

This would also apply to whatever set up you used for your wing. In mine, it was just a chain of bones like an arm, that I bent and scaled to create my flapping. If you did it differently just make sure the bones are parented the same way.

EDIT: Also make sure you copy all the wing bones at the same time. If you copy and paste "one at a time" they aren't parented. You can reparent and it should work.

Thanks.

Yes, the problem was that the new bones (the copies of the wing bones) weren't parented.

The problem with the angles being 180 degrees off resulted from my flipping the layer around to make it look symmetrical, as I should have known.

Here's the latest:



Now I just need to give that flapping some style - it looks a bit mechanical - and add movement to the rest of the character.

I remember I did a flying bird once with one wing animated, and the bones of the other wing were controlled by the first one. Must be in the forum somewhere. I'm sure the same technique applies here, so any change you do in animation will immediately show in both wings.

Yes, I did have a small problem with that, so I copied a new wing bone to go with the far wing and translated the whole thing forward (once parented properly).

Because of point animation the curves are pretty fragile. Any excess bone movement exposes tiny flaws. So I am going to try to stick with layer movement, and perhaps some holds and ease in/outs in the timeline. I know I can make the wing-flap quicker and install a hold at the bottom.

If I didn't need to put in additional movements later (the character is going to be grabbed right out of the sky) I would use switch layers for the wing-flap motions.

The flying dollar in this one (done in ASP 6), has wings that are switch layers.

willf wrote:The flying dollar in this one (done in ASP 6), has wings that are switch layers.

Honestly, the switch layers look better.

So how would I go about turning that key-framed wing movement into switch layers?

willf wrote:So how would I go about turning that key-framed wing movement into switch layers?

I don't think at this point the switch layers would save you time or effort. The wing movement is already keyed. I think the switch layer would require doing it again with individual "frame" layers for each switch and not use bones.

What you could do to save time and wouldn't require copying/pasting bones again, would be to use bone constraints for one side of the wings. One side of the wing bones would have angle constraints to the other side. you would remove the keys of course as they aren't needed. Unlike "legs" in a walk cycle, wings have symmetrical movement so bone constraints would work pretty well. The flapping is exactly the same on each side.

However, you could also simply key each side "by hand" to match. This is what I did. I just keyed one side, then matched the angles for the other side. This allows for independent movement of the wings.

Another thing you could do is create smart bones to control the wing flap. Create a smart bone to flap each wing. This could be pretty cool and would make animating that type of large gliding creature a bit easier.

Create a smart bone that would flap the wing from top to bottom. Then you can control the speed of the flapping. You could have the wings flap and then slow and stop at the horizontal position to glide... all with a single smart bone rotation. You could create one smart bone for each wing or one smart bone to flap both. This is what I plan to do with my flapping bird. The good part with the smart bones, is that you could still animate the wing bones separately from the smart bone if you need to.

Thank you for your replies, they are quite helpful.

I have implemented most of your suggestions, matching bone angles to get the wing to be more symmetrical and using constraints to restrict unwanted movement. This did allow me to remove some keyframes and some extraneous point animation.

The difficulty is that if the bone rotation is too identical, the far wing hides behind the near one. So the trick is to make them move evenly while allowing more of the far wing to show. I added a highlight on the back of the wing surfaces to help differentiate them.

Next up is to make a smart bone for the wing-flap as also suggested by Heyvern. Because the little guy is about the size of a cat, he needs to be able to flap even faster than he does now.

But you know unconsciously I suppose I am already working on the pterodactyl character, and it's probably sneaking out. Her wings are about 2-3 times bigger than this guy. I have the feeling that the ptero is going to be doing a lot of gliding.

Anyway, here's the latest cleaned-up version. The whole character is rigged now, and I added some rotation and translation to the torso bone to get the dynamics to kick in.

my thoughts are that the wings don't really look like they are flapping as much as they do folding and unfolding. If you look at the wings you did on the little dollar bill it does a full flap from up to down, that is what is missing here imo. Also, if you want it to look more 'switchy' you could use step interpolation and play with the step sizes?

If the wings are moving super fast, you will need to start using smears instead of clean art like this, and that is probably best done with a combination of switches...

Hope that helps, please feel free to ignore me

The wing movement looks good, if not a little incomplete as the wings never go lower than the body.

Also to my eyes, the head and tail movement should go opposite the wings: wings down, head and tail up and vice versa.

the wings never go lower than the body.

Until now I've been leery of pulling the wing too low, because it seemed like it may take layer re-ordering to keep it looking consistent. But a smart bone would probably help with that.

Oops on the head/body thing. I had some bone translation on the torso in a previous version that had the head and body moving opposite each other, but I took it out to put in the smart bone with no torso movement, I'll add it back in later.

Pulling the wing down could use a trick I used for my penguins. Although they don't actually fly, they do "flap" their wings the same way and the wings have to show both sides. I did this without any layer ordering.



Towards the end the penguins waddle across. You can see the flippers change color as they go up and down. This fakes a flip of the wings/flippers. No layer order animation, just some reverse scaling and shape color changes with a smart bone.

The trick is finding and hiding that "flip" point of the wing. The trick is to do the "color change" of the wing shape at the half way point using a smart bone. With "flexible" wings that sort of "overlap" might be a bit tricky but not impossible.

If you watch bird flight videos the downward stroke of the wing is "fully extended". The wings don't "fold up" on the down stroke to get the full lifting power of the wings. On the up stroke the wing "folds up" close to the body so as not to lose the lift from the down stroke.

On the down stroke the wing will sort of line up with the view at the halfway point allowing that color flip to fake the layer order change. If the wing is flapping fairly quickly that change can be hidden pretty well.

It's the folding up stroke that might be tricky. However the design of your creature makes this a bit easier to pull off. You use "flat" colors so the wing could be split into two shapes. As the wing folds for the up stroke one half would switch color showing the "underside" color, then as it folds up, the other half shows the other color.

I can see this in my head and will try to do a sample. I think it would work pretty well.

Here's a really really really simple file sample:


wing-flap-shape-flipping

Selah: