Animate a bird ? Send help pls ! :)

MaloneXI

Hi all , 

For one of my project, I need to animate a bird , especially a crow. But I've never touched the animation panel , except for clothing simulation and these kind of things...
I was wondering if there are some ready-to-use animations for some models , like Daz Crow or others , or if I have to animate key-by-key the model. It's possible, of course. But as I use DAZ , I really want to stay in its environement and understand how to deal with that. 

The animation is quite simple , it's just about a crow flying, the camera is located in front of the model, and I'll loop the video during some seconds. 

I could possibly do that on another software , but the crow models on daz are really awesomes. 

If someone could help me , guiding me through the way I have to prepare the animation, bying an animation pack  etc ... 

Thanx a lot ! 

Leana

I don't know of an animation pack for the Daz Crow, but this pose set has various flying poses which might help when setting up an animation: https://www.daz3d.com/the-familiar-poses-for-daz-crow

MaloneXI

Thank you I had already seen this pack before. May I'll work with it to animate the crow if I have no choice ... 

I thaught Daz had a kind of basic movements libraries or this kind of things ... 

Thanx ! 

Ryuu@AMcCF

Hi MaloneXI,

Doing animations is awesome and can also be frustrating. Of course, you already know how to do a still: just set up your scene, pose your figures, arrange your camera position and lighting, and render away. The good news is, in animation, it's pretty much the same idea as doing a still. but it's really just a series of "stills" that is stretched out along the timeline bar--those are your "keyframes".

But for animation, it's a lot trickier since it involves the making specific changes to your scene at specific points on the timeline using those keyframes: move the wrong thing--it shows; NOT move the thing that's supposed to move when it's supposed to move--it shows; and rendering ALL the frames of even short animations is agonizingly slow--and you're STILL likely to discover an error only AFTER that hellacious render session!

Unfortunately, I can't provide all the info you'd need in a single reply. But there are tons of tutorials for making animations that can give you great lessons. There are also tons of bird & wing animation resources and references to show you how different birds fly--and be mindful, each bird species flies differently! Crows WON'T fly like eagles or hummingbirds (although it might be fun to see what that could look like  )

If you don't mind spending a few $, DAZ has a tool that might help: https://www.daz3d.com/ireal-animated-flocks-of-birds. The DAZ page also has a tutorial on how to use the product, and even if you don't buy it, it might still have some useful info.

OTOH, if you've got time but no money, then watching the animation tutorials would probably help more:

DAZ provides some of their own: https://www.daz3d.com/3d-animation

WP Guru has a lot of indepth explanations, but it can sometimes be a little hard to follow his train of thought, especially when he changes the subject in the middle of explaning something. 

 

Now for the birds:

(I'm NOT apologizing for that pun)

Artists like Aaron Blaise gives a good explanation into the mechanics of birdflight:

On the amount of timing within the strokes--the shorter the distance between the vertical lines, the shorter the time between the shown positions of the wing.: https://pixabay.com/vectors/bird-flight-stages-steps-motion-146864/

And if you promise to not be freaked out by all the math equations, there's what I hope can be another helpful explaination of the timing involved in the wingstrokes on page 4 of this PDF: https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/flight/wu2003realistic.pdf

 

Then, after watching the animation tuturials, you just need to apply those lessons on how to move your bird's wings over the timeline. For a bird, it's much like swimming (breaststroke) is for us--birds are simply "swimming" through the air: there's a long-period powerstroke with their wings fully extended that drives them forward, a glide period, a quick un-powered upstroke (which involves a partial folding of the wings) to prepare for the next powerstroke, and another glide period before repeating.

 

Hope this all helps.

 

Huh!? COOL!! I got featured! 

Phatmartino

Woah, ☝️ awesome! Also, if you use Daz Crow specifically, take a look at this thread. I did a bit of simple animating with it and there's a few details about the way some of it's posing works you might benefit from... https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/611446/daz-crow-familiar-poses#Comment_7940046

WendyLuvsCatz

puppeteer could be useful  too