Daz Dragon 3 animation tests

Bryan Steagall

Recently, I've been playing around with constraints in Motionbuilder to help me with several animation tasks.  The constraint system in Motionbuilder is extremely powerful if you can just get your head around how it works (it took me a long while), which I then use to bring the animations into Daz Studio.   My latest tests involve wings of all sorts to see if I can get realistic movement without having to do it by hand.(which would be extremely time consuming to get right)

Here's a screen capture  from mobu with the Daz 3 Mythical dragon from 3d Universe   https://vimeo.com/315468763  This is all done automatically, the wing flap, the slight bobbing of the head and tail.  The wing flapping is controlled by a null object with custom properties which are used in a relational constraint to control the speed of the flapping.  This constraint uses a sine ramp on the wings and all their joints to generate the movement (which also is tied into the hip to provide the slight translation/rotation.   I then used another series of relation constraints to dampen the movement of the neck joints and tails to create a slight delay, resulting in the bobbing up and down based on the wing flap.

Here's the result in Daz Studio, with both the daz dragon and mythical dragon side by side.. https://vimeo.com/315469367

The movement was based by looking at slow motion videos of bats in flight, which I think are the most appropriate..  and here's the 120 frame .duf file for everyone  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rrjwdb2otc37y7c/AABQ6LBemQDFGaxnYVXeIjtMa?dl=0  just plop these two files in a pose folder for the dragon to use

I've also used this to animate multiple wings, like found on dragonflies (which could be used on fairy wings)  If interested, please message me, or if you'd like this to become a tutorial, please let me know

takezo_3001

Thanks for this! Too bad DS doesn't have decent animation tools at the moment, still hopeful that they'll include it in future versions...

Bryan Steagall

Hi Takezo  You are welcome

I have my doubts about that.. unfortunately, those of use using it for animation are a minority, and it is still targeted to static image creation.

Vially

<--- Would be animator constantly hitting the wall of "if Only Daz would..."

Anyway, the motion looks pretty good, people usually don't concider that we have all these muscles and ballancing mechanics in out bodies to keep our heads straight and level! It's a ballancing thing, we would get so motion sick if we didn't have them, so good job on the secondary motions!

The wings themselves look good, nice back strech and follow through; however, (should be minor fix) when fully "up" the wing tips overlap, or crash into each other. this causes them to appear jabbing through each other. Maybe less of an "up" position, or can the tips be twisted to point them away from each other at that point?

Other than that it looks great.

Bryan Steagall

HI Vially..  thanks for pointing that out.    It is quite an easy fix, it is just a matter of adjusting the amplitude of the wing beat.  However, in some of the slow motion videos  of bat wing movement that I used as a reference, the wing tips frequently touch each other, and here's another example of "if only Daz would".. collisions!  So dforce might be a solution, but I would have to fiddle with that to see if it could provide a good fix.

But thanks for the comment!

Vially

Bryan Steagall said:

However, in some of the slow motion videos  of bat wing movement that I used as a reference, the wing tips frequently touch each other,

That would be the 'flapping' sound we hear, I can see it happening where the tips collide and make an I shape, but what I could see was more an X, definately passing through one another.

Anyway, good luck and let us know how it turns out.

I'm still praying for real honest to goodness gravity, so a character gets "locked" in place based on the ballance of weight.

You can't put all your weight on your left foot, and then lift it off the ground, you just can't, I've tried, I usually fall down when I do.