First Stages

I have done some slight mock versions of how I would like my rig to work. I talked to Paul Noble (lecturer) and we spoke about how to use scripts in expressions and get the desired effect on the rig on a basic level and how i would elabirate on it to get a realistic wing simulation using the information from this paper  ClickHere To Visit Paper.  to get the right rotation on certain joints and even giving me information to show how the tail would rotate and move in conjunction to the wing the joints so i may add a tail to my project now which will give more realism to the rig and just be a nice feature which wont be too difficult to add to the rig.

Project Summary

My final year project is to script an automated wing rig which will simulate over a given path automatically saving the animator time. Using Autodesk Maya, MEL script and expressions, the rig would let the animator draw a path and the rig would automatically follow the given trajectory banking where necessary and preforming certain wing beats depending on if the rig is cruising, gliding , descending, turning etc. Fundamentally recreating an actual birds in flight. This project is mostly about the rig but I may make a simple bird model and skin to it to make it look a lot nicer.

Picture taken from Bendan Body's Blog Tutorials

 http://brendanbody.blogspot.com/search/label/Tutorials

Work So Far

 So far through the project I have done a lot of research on how best to get the intended result. I have also chose to learn how to rig, so I opted to rig the characters for my Animation Group Project module which has taught me a lot about rigging in general and a lot about using scripts and expressions on how to get my rig working in the desired way, which is so helpful to my project.

 Just a couple of screen shots of the character rig i have made.