XSI toony bird -feathers in ICE

[sirdavid32]

Ok, here´s my current wip. I´m working toward the end of the week to finish it and animate this guy:


Bests.

[Hirazi Blue]

Looks fascinating...
Could you tell us some more about the rig and the setup
(as it seems the Vimeo video lacks sound, or is this just with me?)

[sirdavid32]

Sure, I´m having a production diary here:
http://www.foro3d.com/portafolio/sirdavid23/

As soon as it´s finished in spanish I´ll translate it all and post it here.
This week I´ve been dealing on balancing the hair and ice feathers setup. For both of them
to look realistic take almost the same amount of time. Particularly this bird is being rigged for dancing, as in real life these birds dance to mate with females. So I thought of a funny story to show it. Also this week I´m adding the controllers and synoptic.

About the setup, I´ve researched a lot of wing setups and none were adequate for the kind of thing I wanted to do. So I adpated my own. For example, you can take the controler of the wind (in humans would be the wrist) and this drives the hand and the forearm. Ultimately I´ll use an animation clip to fold his wings, so It could be switched on and off.

The setup for the feathers was done in ICE. Some nodes point to variation on size and others vary on orientation, that way I can eerie the feather with a weight controller. It´s fun like so, since the birds do shake and eerie. I´ll post more of my ICE trees. I was looking for a fether solution compound, I saw a few and gave me good ideas, that´s when I started to work on my own thing. Path constrained all other single feathers (modeled 12 about each individual) and tangented them on the curve. Since the curve has but a few points, these in turn will manipulate the wings more realistically. I can then create individual controlers for the up vector´s expression (if he needed to fly) to simulate resistance against wind with a noise setup.

I hope to have another video ready by this friday.
Thanks.

My blog it´s : http://www.activemotionpictures.com/blog
There´s a feed.

ps: how do I change the thumbnail that´s displaying now on the front page of the forum? I´d like it to be the one at: 10:00 from the video?

[sirdavid32]

The video lacks sound. As in other forums with previous video they told me it´s better for it to be muted than to have lousy music. And I didn´t really wanted to explain something that it´s a WIP right now, but rather later, when it´s finished.
This is more like a progress for this week thing.