- Modifié
Head Rigging for Bird Animation
Hello,
I am working on animating a budgie, and I am trying to figure out how to rig the head.
When birds walk, ignoring pigeons and similar birds, they generally dont move their heads. Chickens and parrots in particular have magical stationary head powers.
I have a basic walk cycle down, but it is lacking in birdiness due to the following problems:
The head bobs with the body,
the tail looks strange,
actual budgies hobble when they walk and have a bit of a bounce as well when they run.
My primary concern is the head though.
Can anyone suggest a means to animate the bird to have a lively body while keeping its head stable?
Redrawing or adding parts is okay too, but it often leads to breakage of existing rigging.
I am not sure if this is in a right category, as I guess it isn't editor related, but somebody will probably move it to a more fitting category eventually.
I am sorry if this is something you are already familiar with, but what I would suggest would be to go through the 12 principles of animation available here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd that could help you a lot in making your animations looking a lot more lively. I am a self taught animator myself and it helped me a lot.
Furthermore, I think that if you aren't going for hyper realistic, life-imitating animations, exaggerating the animations usually really helps the overall feeling. So the body could move up and down a bit more, also the tail and the head should go in the opposite direction than the body, as they lag behind.
And lastly, I found this bird walk animation Bird walkcycle - YouTube (with fantastic music, really) which could help, even though that it's a pigeon.
And in fact, budgies seemsto be doing a lot of motion with their heads Sparky the Budgie moon walking for his friend - YouTube
Hope this helps!
I have studied the principles of animation many years ago, but the link does indeed help as I dont remember a whole lot of it.
Originally I had someone else doing the animations, but they cancelled on me so I'm having to relearn a lot.
Budgies are known for their excessive pecking, but if they are walking longer distances, the head only moves side to side a bit and up and down movement from my observations seems unintentional due to terrain or to get a better view. I like to think of it like an Ergotron computer monitor arm mount. You can move it around and it stays there, but there is a maximum distance.
Anyways this is a picture to hopefully better explain what I am trying to do with the rigging.
aside from the lack of neck, this is as close of a rendition as I can create quickly of what a budgie jump looks like. It will pop up its back before lowering it and then springing in to a jump. Here I just manually set the position and rotation numbers for the head bone but it takes a long time and is quite hard to keep track of. When I move the body, it moves the head as well which I dont want in this case. I tried rigging it up in a few different ways but I always end up with something moving when I don't want it to.
Also is it bad practice to move the bone away from its parent or does anything go as long as it works?
The other option that I'm currently testing out is having the head as a separate piece and using code to position the head in the game, but it's tricky timing everything.
You could have the root bone with 2 children: the body and rest of the bird, and the head. This way the head doesn't move when the body does. The head still moves with the root. You'll have to take care to move the head to keep it from detaching from the body, depending on the animation. This is done here.
Next you could use a transform constraint (assuming you are using PRO, sorry documentation is not yet available) to constrain the head to the body. This allows you to turn the constraint on and have the head move with the body (eg, to have the bird peck the ground), or turn it off and have the head move with the root.
You may try applying a IK constraint to head bone, http://take.ms/L88CF like this. After that, if you move body up or down, head is still looking at that point. It's like a Look At constraint in 3d max.