Bird Rig - Updates?

[Hannah]

Hi All,

I am potentially needing to rig a bird, is there any templates to start from? I have searched this forum but havnt seen anything recent about birds

Thanks in advance,

[chrislesage]

I don’t know of any bird template. I’ve done a few birds, but they are usually cartoony style or very quick commercials. In my experience, the rig can be pretty basic, and that’s the easy part. You can pretty much use a modified biped template, delete the hands, and add some extra phalanges to control the wing.

The hard part is setting something up for the feathers, and there is no Shifter component to handle that. You’ll have to do some custom stuff, probably with nurbs surfaces, and custom upvectors if you are working with something like Yeti. It will really depend how realistic you are aiming for.

I don’t have any kind of tutorial. But here is a gif, and I’ll explain a bit one technique I’ve used (this isn’t Shifter):

1. Set up a pretty basic IK/FK arm with maybe one finger at the end.
2. Set up a few phalanges to control the arc of the wing. I guess birds don’t have phalanges like bats, but bird rigs certainly can!
3. Put a nurbs plane along the BOTTOM edge of the wing. Skin that to the arm. (Not the phalanges! The phalanges will be driven by this.)
4. Attach some follicles/uvpin along the surface of the nurbs plane. Use those as upvectors for the phalanges, so they aim and keep a nice spread and arc.
5. Then sometimes I skin a dense lattice to the arm and phalanges. And I drive the feathers by the lattice instead of skinning. So they can have a nice smooth result.
   • The lattice can also drive any guide curves for things like Yeti or xgen.
   • If I do that, then I try to also make offset controls for each feather, so poses can be tweaked if needed.
   • Actually I’m simplifying this, so it doesn’t get too long. I actually put nurbs ribbons inside the lattice. And put 5 to 8 follicles/uvpins along the ribbons. And skin the feather to that ribbon. Then you have an additional amount of bend control inside the lattice. But this gets a bit complex, and you need the controls to be local before the lattice. So one local control is bending the feathers. And one control is following the rig, and the follower control drives the local control. (I hope that made sense.) For very quick and cheap rigs, sometimes the lattice is all you need.

[Hannah]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this out! The Job I was on was thankfully no feathers very simple but I will use this when Ive got some free time to test it out myself.