Wings

This video is part of the official comprehensive video course about Duik Ángela

Like all tetrapods, bird wings, and bat wings, consist of an arm, a forearm and a hand with fingers. Both bird and bat wings can be rigged the same way with Duik: birds have feathers attached to the arm, and the Duik wing armature includes bones for these feathers. The feather bones can be used to rig the actual fingers of the bats which have the same role as feathers for birds.

The Auto-rig creates a single controller for the whole wing: most of the animation can be automated and controlled from the rotation, position and a few properties in the effect of this controller.

But before being able to animate correctly the wing (especially to fold and unfold it), you have to adjust a setting for each of the Feather effects.

1. Fold the wing, using the Fold wing property in the Wing effect on the controller.
2. For each feather, adjust the Folded angle property in the corresponding Feather effect on the controller, so the wing looks nice when folded.
3. You can now unfold the wing and animate everything on the wing, the setup is finished.

Wing effect

The effect to control the wing.

The Wing rig is similar to a standard FK control, except it also handles automatically the rotation and animation of the feathers.

You can animate the rotation of the controller to flap the wing, and animate each part of the arm individually in the Wing effect.

The Fold wing property in the effect can be used to animate the folding and unfolding of the wing very easily.

The General parameters section contains a few properties to adjust the settings of the wing:

• Forearm orientation controls whether the forearm should rotate with the arm or keep its own orientation. The choice depends on the animation you’re working on, and your personal preference.
• Wing flexibility and Air resistance are the two usual settings which come with the automatic overlapping animation Duik generates with FK controls².

Finally, you can control how the wings attached to the hand part of the arm should rotate with the Hand rotation multiplicator in the Feather parameters section of the effect; changing this ratio adjusts the amplitude of the movement of the feathers when the wing flaps.

Feather effect

An effect to control and adjust a feather.

Use the Rotation property to control the rotation of each feather individually if you need.

The Settings section is to be used only during the rigging process and should not be changed afterwards (read above).