Creating wings

kaotkbliss

I have a set of wings that are broken into many different pieces which I positioned and parented to each other. What I'd like to do now is make them all a single piece with opening/closing and flapping sliders.

How would I go about doing this?

patience55

kaotkbliss said:

I have a set of wings that are broken into many different pieces which I positioned and parented to each other. What I'd like to do now is make them all a single piece with opening/closing and flapping sliders.

How would I go about doing this?

For starters, are you rigging this in D/S?
And then, legacy rigging or triax?

kaotkbliss

I forget there is more than just Daz available :O
I'm using Daz Studio and The rest of the outfit is Triax so I should probably keep them the same format.

What I did was I had gotten an .obj (Full figure) from sharecg and made all my edits to remove the figure but keep the outfit. When I was done with all of this in hexagon, I sent them over to daz, converted them to Triax and did a rigging transfer to make the completed outfit. The only thing I left out was the wings as they wouldn't have the same skeleton as G2.

*edit*
the screenshot is right before I rigged the outfit

patience55

kaotkbliss said:

I forget there is more than just Daz available :O
I'm using Daz Studio and The rest of the outfit is Triax so I should probably keep them the same format.

What I did was I had gotten an .obj (Full figure) from sharecg and made all my edits to remove the figure but keep the outfit. When I was done with all of this in hexagon, I sent them over to daz, converted them to Triax and did a rigging transfer to make the completed outfit. The only thing I left out was the wings as they wouldn't have the same skeleton as G2.

*edit*
the screenshot is right before I rigged the outfit

Okay.

I hope you have one of the rigging tutorials such as Blondie's rigging for original figures. Explains a lot.
Eventually I may be covering wings and skeletons over in the Hexagon thread but in the meantime, for triax rigging, one starts with "one mesh". So back in Hexagon, in exactly the correct position for loading on G2, the entire wing set has to be "one mesh". This is not simply "welding" it all together using the weld all button, it is actually all welded TO gether so that when one part is moved, the rest "has to" go along with it. Seems to me that all the wing models I've purchased load with the wings open. Same concept as having the arms straight out, easier to get the bones right.

Design Anvil - Razor42

Its a pretty big leap into rigging to start with wings. I would suggest starting with a few simpler project to get yourself orientated to the process. Even as basic as a door that opens and shuts might be a good start. But its pretty much a similar process whatever your rig.

Heres a free resource from Sparky to get you started.

http://philosophersegg.com/resources/SparkysDS4ProRiggingTutorial.pdf

kaotkbliss

Patience55 said:

Okay.

I hope you have one of the rigging tutorials such as Blondie's rigging for original figures. Explains a lot.
Eventually I may be covering wings and skeletons over in the Hexagon thread but in the meantime, for triax rigging, one starts with "one mesh". So back in Hexagon, in exactly the correct position for loading on G2, the entire wing set has to be "one mesh". This is not simply "welding" it all together using the weld all button, it is actually all welded TO gether so that when one part is moved, the rest "has to" go along with it. Seems to me that all the wing models I've purchased load with the wings open. Same concept as having the arms straight out, easier to get the bones right.

I don't think I have any rigging tutorials :(

That should be easy enough to do: reposition the wings, send to Hex, select all the pieces and do an average weld which will recreate the wings into a single mesh, then send back to Daz.

From there I'd probably have to create my own bones and weight mapping as transferring rigging from another set of wings probably wouldn't work as bends would be in different spots...

Its a pretty big leap into rigging to start with wings. I would suggest starting with a few simpler project to get yourself orientated to the process. Even as basic as a door that opens and shuts might be a good start. But its pretty much a similar process whatever your rig.

Heres a free resource from Sparky to get you started.

http://philosophersegg.com/resources/SparkysDS4ProRiggingTutorial.pdf

I've done a couple pieces but using different methods for each. I've got a few models lined up for practicing more rigging work although I think it's mostly just simple rigging transferring. I'll definitely take a look at the tutorial you linked to :)

patience55

kaotkbliss said:

... edit ...

I don't think I have any rigging tutorials :(

That should be easy enough to do: reposition the wings, send to Hex, select all the pieces and do an average weld which will recreate the wings into a single mesh, then send back to Daz.

... edit ...

Well that would be nice but I don't think so. If 2 lines are together the average weld will make it one, but if not it will still be separate meshes just grouped together as one.

With the tutorials having been on sale [haven't checked yet to see if they still are], the rigging of original figures would have been a good one to catch.

I saw some of the mesh in one of your other posts ... good luck. I do remakes too but honestly, if you can learn how to model some of those pieces yourself it would actually be less work. Triangles are a LOT of work and in coming from other modeling programs, are often not considered welded together by Hexagon in the first place. Try for quads if/when you can.

kaotkbliss

With the average weld, all the meshes become a single mesh, you can no longer select different parts of the object.

After messing around with the wings off and on all day, I've come to the conclusion that I have 2 options.

1. I can create bones and paint the weightmaps manually (as I did with the arm gun)
or
2. I can leave all the pieces separate and just reposition the rotation point and parent them all together (requires adding bones and adjusting them)

Both options are going to be a lot of work as I've been messing with the bones all day and trying to get the pieces to rotate correctly is painful :(

patience55

kaotkbliss said:

With the average weld, all the meshes become a single mesh, you can no longer select different parts of the object.

After messing around with the wings off and on all day, I've come to the conclusion that I have 2 options.

1. I can create bones and paint the weightmaps manually (as I did with the arm gun)
or
2. I can leave all the pieces separate and just reposition the rotation point and parent them all together (requires adding bones and adjusting them)

Both options are going to be a lot of work as I've been messing with the bones all day and trying to get the pieces to rotate correctly is painful :(

I made a chain link sash ... it would fall to pieces even if welded as one in Hexagon. But if for whatever reason it is working for you, great!

kaotkbliss

Unfortunately I couldn't remember how I set up the arm gun (I wish I would have documented it better) so what I ended up doing, was converting each of the pieces to figures. Then set the start and end points of the bones and adjusted the xyz origin so that moving a specific rotation slider adjusted the fold of the wings.

Not a pretty solution but at least they are usable right now.