Hello there, I’m making some minecraft items but realistic and I just made this dragon-like wing for an elytra, tried rigging it, and failed. I think it was a problem with my rigging methods so i’m going to try again but with a tutorial. However, I don’t want to waste time on it in case it doesn’t work so could someone with more skill than me take a look at my model and see if it’s ready to rig or if I need to do further prep:
h ttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1nEN16MEcWppQfGX6pEmGdtVV5nfKHXlE/view?usp=sharing
What you have to keep in mind is that all an armature is going to do is to move the vertices; the edges are still going to be wired up in the same way.
The only reason you don’t see smooth shading problems on here already is because its planar. Once you start deforming it, that will no longer be the case, and the shading will start to fall apart.
Additionally, you have far more vertices in the leading edge than you’d want. Your loops are 128 vertices, when 16 would be more than enough.
There are also a lot of areas of non-manifold geometry.
This is not appropriate for rigging. But!-- there’s nothing wrong with trying to rig it anyways, so that you can learn that for yourself. It is difficult to learn what is good topology without spending some time working with bad topology.
If you haven’t yet rigged anything, I would recommend working through some tutorials, with models as provided from those tutorials, so you can learn the basic ropes. Once you’ve done that though, yeah, try rigging this wing. Just spend a few hours on basic bones and trying to get good weights, good deformations, nothing fancy. It’s a good learning experience.
When I try rigging it the skin on the wings aren’t actually attached to the main stick thing. So when I move the armature, the wing skin will either go through the stick, or tear apart from it. Idk why this is happening coz I fixed the weight painting and all and when I said it wasn’t attached I meant it wasn’t attached when I moved the bones. I built it so that it would be attached but it’s buggy. Any fixes? I need the wing to be able to fold almost completely so that it can be hidden behind a person’s back and also need it to be able to spread out again.
You need to retopologize it. Whether or not that’s easy depends on you and on what counts as easy to you. Do an image search for “3d wing topology.” Then, do a Google search for “blender retopo tutorial.”
To troubleshoot specific issues, I need a file with an armature and weights. There are too many details otherwise.
