Article Focus: In this tutorial, Jannis Labelle demonstrates modelling and animating a bird in flight. This is a follow up of his head tutorial so he will not go into a great detail of describing techniques in minute detail, instead he will try to introduce you to some alternatives in modeling, texturing and animation. It is a tutorial for intermediate level users, you would need to know your way around the view ports, tools, the Attribute Manager and be comfortable with using Photoshop. Still, even as a beginner you will find a lot of information here, so with a bit of effort you should get going. The task will be to model a bird, texture it and animate it, using some shortcuts to demonstrate that there many ways to skin a cat, or a bird for that matter.
Jannis has included a file of the finished model for you to download here and use as you wish. If you are comfortable with your modeling you can skip this part, grab the mesh and go to the texturing, rigging or animating part, so you can use the tutorial to suit your needs. What ever part you choose to do Jannis hopes that you have fun and learn something. If you do use his model a small mention will be appreciated. But try to make your own, modelling comes only from persevering.
Animating the Bird
When starting out in animation it is a good idea to start with something easy and humans are perhaps the most difficult. Start with fishes or birds because they both float and don't have to deal with gravity which brings allot of problems to the animator. Also their motion is cyclical, so you can repeat a bird flying or a fish swimming quite well. In this animation I have not given you any settings, because creating motion is case of 'feel' and not of measurement. Too much measurement make movement too mechanical. I have also included a movie to show you the end result and to help you fine tune your movement, but this is a tutorial of how you can utilize Cinema R8 for a project like this.
Let's start animating. Import your model with the bones or use the one provided. Select the shoulder bone (01)and drag and drop it in theTimeline (02) . Make sure in the Timeline you have chosen Edit, remove all to empty so you only have the Shoulder bone you want to animate. With the rotation tool rotate the shoulder bone as in (03)
Turn off all tracks other than Rotation and in frame 1 record a keyframe (02).
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Go to frame 20 and again using the rotation tool move the Shoulder bone as in (04)
Record another keyframe (05)
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Select the first rotation keyframes and Control-drag them to copy them on frame 40 (06).
If you play the animation now, you will see the wings flapping once.
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To make them flap repeatedly, right click on the sequences and choose Adjust. You will see the sequences adjust from the first to the last key frame.
In the attribute manager you will also see the Sequences properties (08). Loops indicates how many times your animation will loop over repeating itself, effectively how may wing beats you will get for the duration. Put a number there that divides your project's length exactly if you want your animation to play in a loop as a movie. The reason my inputs come in decimals is because I have adjusted the length of the animation to get better timing after I finished the project. The way you can do this is by dragging the red handles circled in (07). Loop boarder tells you how many frames you need to complete the loops so you can use this a reference to set your project settings.
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To give the wings a more realistic feel, drop the 3 end bones in the Timeline (09).
Record a keyframe for frame 1, 20 and 40 same as the shoulder bone without making any changes.
At frame 30 bend all three bones to prepare the wing for the upward movement and record another keyframe (10).
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You can see now the wing folding realistically as it beats (11).
We have set an extra keyframe at frame 1 because it gives us the chance to set up another mini loop if it is needed.
Now we want to make some secondary motion for the head and the tail. Starting with the head, select both the Head and Neck bone and drop them in the Timeline (12).
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Go to frame 1 and at the up height of the wings lift the head up manipulating the Head and Neck bones. Record a keyframe (13).
Move to frame 20 and stretch the head forward and record another keyframe (14).
Control-drag all the keyframes for Neck and Head bones to copy them to frame 40.
Now the head moves nicely in time to with the wing beat.
Select all the sequences and give them the same amount of loops as the Shoulder bone (08).
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To create some motion in the tail, drag-drop all the tail bones in
the Timeline (15), move them
up in frame 1 (16)and record
a keyframe.
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Move them down in frame 20 and record a keyframe(17)
. Control-drag them to frame 40 and again input the correct amount of
loops in the Sequence properties and your animation is finished (18).
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In order to create the feeling of flight, instead of animating the position of the bird I animated a camera (19). You can see all the tracks in the timeline.
I also used the Fcurve manager to animate manipulate the cameras properties. A lot of the time people ask in the forums about Align to spline animation of the camera, in most cases, this is the wrong choice. Animating with Fcurves is what you should try to get used to, but this should be the subject of another tutorial.
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Study the finished animation file that comes with this tutorial to
get a better idea. I hope you had fun with this and you have learned
something you can apply to any other project.
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