How to make realistic looking beating wings

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi,

I’m working on an animation that will contain many winged insects

How can I make the wings beat in a fashion that will look realistic?
In nature their wings would beat multiple hundred times per second.

I imagine some sort of blur should be used,
but I don’t know how to go about doing that.

atm, I have the wings moving from full up to down in one frame, then down to up in one frame, which I have repeating until the wings stop moving

But this looks terrible when rendered

so if anyone knows how I can make it look good, it would be much appreciated,

2

What kinds of insects are you animating? and what version of blender are you using?

3

A bee.

Bees wings beat at 230 times per second

I’m using blender 2.49

4

You can probably get by with the wings beating at a much slower rate than 230 per second. I just made a test with 12 beats per second and with motion blur applied and it worked great.

I used vector blur nodes to create the blur, unfortunately i don’t know how to set that up in 2.49 - I only use 2.5. Someone else is going to have to answer the specific software questions for you.

5

Quick sample for 2.49:
http://www.filefactory.com/file/b0ee6b3/n/beewing.blend

If you go for 1080p you got 30fps.
I went for 10 beats per second.
IIRC the wings got a twist in the updown movement too an 8 shaped movement… so you got high, middlewithtwist and low each frame and blur it with compositing nodes.
or go with 15/second and twist it opposite and up and down.
There´s plenty of room to experiment =)

6

thanks :smiley:
that helped a lot
I didn’t know about vector blur until now