ANIMATE A WING USING DEFORMER
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This tutorial wants to show a method
to animate a bird's wings using Maya's bend deformer.
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1. create a sphere as the bird’s
body
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2. using a planes, create a wing
shape
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3. select the wing and then select
Animation Menu -> Deform -> Create Nonlinear -> Bend
Rotate the deformer and position
it at the point where the wing should bend
Position the deformer with the
centre where the wing bends, set High Bound to 0 and set a higher
value to the Low Bound so that the bending surface is more round
Click on Curvature and middle mose
dragging in the viewport will change the value (like a slider)
and you will see the surface bending
4. Now it’s time to set some
key and animate the wing. Depending on how much u want your
wing to be deformed, set a value for Curvature when the wing
is up.. Press right click and select Key Selected. You’ll
the field changing into another color.
Then drag with the cursor on time
slider to second 24 (for example) and at Curvature set a negative
value (so the wing will bend in the opposite direction) Again,
Right click on curvature and select Key selected
If dragging the mouse on time slider
between frame 0 and 24 , you can see the wing bending. If the
motion is constant, we have to set the wing to bend during the
entire animation. For this, select Window menu -> Animation
Editors -> Graph Editor
Select the deformer and on Graph
editor window, hit A so that you can see all keyframes. Select
the keyframes in Graph editor and hit Tangents -> Spline
and it will adjust the tangents of the keyframes
Then select Curves -> Post Infinity
-> Oscillate.
Now if dragging on the timeline
the wing will bend up and down to the end of the time line.
As the bird will fly you may need to parent to objects. So this
will be the order of parenting the objects: first parent the
deformer to the wing and then parent the wing to the body. Some
shortcuts for the parenting process: first select the deformer
and then the wing and press P. Then select the wing and at last
the body and press P again. Now all the parts will move together.
To create the second wing with the same setting and deformations,
select the wing and then select edit menu -> Duplicate (and
hit the small cube) and in the Duplicate Options window set
Duplicate Input Graph.. After duplicating the wing set a negative
value for position so that the wing will be scaled in mirror.
Then move the second wing in the
right positon. If you hit player, the wings should fly.
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