2.63a animate a butterfly

Support Animation and Rigging
1

coming from old 2.4b this is confusing.
anyway as both wings move in identical way - just one reversed…
how do i animate one wing then mirror it to the other wing?
i assume i use an armature…
oh, just remembered - it will have to follow a path - if 2.63 does that
thanks

2

Something like this hasnt changed. You’d still use an armature with 3 bones, animate 1 and apply a copy rotation constraint to the other and then assing the follow path constraint

3

thanks
i wish i understood all that jargon!
i can even find where to do the insert I or whatever it used to be!

4

I feel for you; I miss my spacebar automatcially bringing up the add menu as well. Its up on your info window at the top of the screen. Right next to file, see where it says ADD? thats where you want to start.

I’d also read the manual from the wiki:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual

5

well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, try this blend:

[ATTACH]184747[/ATTACH]

and you can see what I meant

6

Thanks the bones are there but nothing flaps as it moves.
what am i missing asides from a brain i mean!

7

Manuals never make sense to me - they always assume you know enough already!
thanks

8

Cause I didnt do all the work, you’ll have to animate the flapping yourself. I just gave you the tools you’ll need to learn the rest

9

thanks for all you did.

10

the wing is parented to the bone - sure don’t look like it.
how do i fix this weird blender shenaigans?
see attached
alt A
thanks

Attachments

BFLY1SEPweird.blend (525 KB)

11

aha. well, first of all you’d want the mesh to be a child of the armature, not the other way around. secondly its because you separated the wing from the rest of the mesh. this makes it a separate object, with its own location data; so when the animation plays it treats the path as 0.0.0 , casuing the mesh to offset by its location values.

as to the wings, in the newer versions of blender you can apply your Armature as a mesh modifier instead of parenting it to the mesh. smoother, cleaner, and easier to recover from whoopsies

12

so even tho the wings and body are one piece i can make the wings move?
as i do not have any idea how to do that i will have to go with what i know - or give up on blender.
also in 2.63 how do tell the bones to keep moving repeated ly.
thanks for your help