Dragon Chimera - Week 5

This week I refined the wing deformations and did a first of skinning with the final feather placement. The animation below was done by Tori.

 

The wing deformations are driven by aim constraints, following a ribbon being deformed by the four primary feather joint aims. The primary feather joints are driven by the wing rotation to maintain equal angle between their parent joint and the subsequent joint. When the wing compresses, this would cause the feathers to cross, so I added an expression to scale the primary aims driving the ribbon (effectively pulling them all into the center)

The expression is an offset asymptote with a clamp.

Since feathers should not have any stretch, I wrote a python script to quickly block skinning on all of the feathers -- the script finds the joints with the largest influence on a mesh and evenly weights the vertices to that joint or joints so the entire mesh has a the same values.