Today you get to hear about the joy of bringing a dragon to life. As you read earlier, I had planned to add Maya muscle to the dragon rig. However, due to time constraints and technical issues, I decided to drop this feature from the production.
One of the features of the dragon is that it uses a cloth simulation to drive the animation of the skin membranes in the wings. To accomplish this means that a few processes had to be followed in setting up the dragon. First the model of the dragon was broken up to separate the individual wing membranes from the main model of the dragon. This was so the cloth could be applied to just the membranes and not the whole dragon.
This also gave a dragon model which could be animated without the membranes. Once the animation was complete, the membranes then had to be attached to the main model again using dynamic constraints and the cloth properties modified so it acted like stretchy skin and not like hanging cloth.
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As this model had been broken apart and stuck back together, it would no longer function with displacement maps as one single mesh, so a duplicate of the original mesh was brought into the scene, and a wrap modifier was added, which makes the seamless mesh of the duplicate skin follow the cut up mesh of the input skin.
The result is a single model with elastic wing membranes driven by a cloth simulation.
(Click to embiggen)
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