I’m currently learning Blender to make creatures for a game. The director actually wants low poly creatures, but I figured that as long as I was learning Blender, I might as well make something I’ve been needing for a long time: a gryphon “wooden mannequin”. Wooden mannequins theoretically are to help an artist draw human proportions and poses correctly, but anyone who actually has one knows that it is nearly impossible to get a wooden mannequin into the poses actually needed. So long ago I switched to Poser Figure Artist for my “wooden mannequin” needs. It’s great as long as what you need is a human.
Yeah, I sure pick nice easy projects for my first go, don’t I?
Naturally I followed the bird wing tutorial here that everyone making bird wings follows. It clearly wasn’t written with beginners in mind, but I did manage to get the armature working. Now I’m at the part that would have theoretically been covered by part 2 of the tutorial… had it existed… the mesh deformation. In my file, everything is assigned to a bone at a full 1.0 because there are so many parts to the gryphon that I thought it’d be easier to make sure everything worked correctly before I made everything work pretty. And for the most part, it does. … … … Except for three stretch bones. I’m assuming the stretch bone at the leading edge of the wing, in the tutorial, is there to attach stuff to. I might be wrong, that might be where I’m going wrong… but why put it there if it’s not meant to attach the front of the wing to? So with that theory in mind, I also made the back half of the tongue a stretch bone (because birds do have stretchy tongues, some more stretchy than others).
It looks correct in edit mode:
http://1drv.ms/1P15jde
But in object mode:
http://1drv.ms/1P15ghs
The tongue:
http://1drv.ms/1P15o0s
Hard to make out, but the stretchy part is sitting too high, and parts of the underside is protruding through the top:
http://1drv.ms/1P15s0l
Looks so pretty:
http://1drv.ms/1P15BAU
Gah spork!:
http://1drv.ms/1P15Dsz
The Blender File:
http://1drv.ms/1P15HbH
The links are all my OneDrive (MSN).