Bird Rig

Goals:

• Rig a realistic bird character for my thesis film

• Create a feather system that is general enough for easy animation but maintains a level of per-feather manipulation for precise control as-needed

As with the fish for A Fish & A Bird—I’d never built one of these before! I did a ton of research about flight mechanics and bird anatomy to make sure I was putting something together that worked realistically and effectively for the needs of the film.

One of the hardest (and then coolest) parts of building the bird was figuring out a wing system. I’d followed a tutorial by AdeptusSteve on YouTube to get me started with a setup that has the feather chains following a hidden planar mesh that softly deformed from a few driver joints. This method made for some very pretty wing shapes with minimal effort by the animator—you can use the “arm” controls exclusively and get lovely curves and a nice spread and contract of each subsection of the wing. But I wanted to have optional control over each feather, just in case a particular gesture by the bird called for it, or if it was needed as a corrective measure.

Tutorialless, but with a final operational goal in-mind, I got to wield scripting not just as a speed tool but as an integral part of my problem solving. I didn’t know from the outset exactly what would need to happen with any offsets or locators to get the aim controllers to follow the wing, but by coding each attempt I could keep a cleaner record of what I’d tried and the results it yielded, and also run the setup over the entire wing so I could see how feather functionality was affected under each section of wing.

Using this ‘Guerilla Code’ I managed to put a bird together that was really fun to animate, and together the fish and bird rigs are major outputs of my thesis year!

For more information on A Fish & A Bird, visit the film page here!