Alright, not a master at the subject in any way close to Duncan, but when I 'unsquished' my feathers in the geo nodes at around 21:12, I had them pointing inwards instead of outwards, and I also had the Multiply node set the feathers so long their tips were omitted. I couldn't fix any of that playing around with the vector maths without fumbling in the dark, haha, so I instead recommend that anybody with the same problems as me play around with the original feather mesh IN EDIT MODE (just transforming it in object mode will not help). I moved it around, scaled it and such, and then I was able to achieve the desired result. It did ruin the 0 to 1 size thing, but... Thanks again for such invaluable knowledge, and I know I'm really stepping out of my league here as someone who doesn't often use Geometry Nodes, I just think I might be able to help someone who's using a different setup (Blender 4.2 here, did not use the scene included in the description) like me.
I also have a gryphon I’m modeling, and this also makes me wanna handplace my feathers… BUT I am going to be strong, and at least try to use the scene you provided! Sadly the feathers are intended for an environment that does not preserve the geometry nodes, but this is such an elegant way to construct them and set their curves. I can’t wait to give it a shot! When I work by hand I’m always like “Okay. I can ‘say’ this with ten feathers.” but I’m really looking forward to bedecking my model with a more accurate amount :D
I'm quite the Blender newb and only use it for fun, so this is technically beyond my level - but it's such great insights and an obviously elegant solution!! Hope to see and learn more from you in the future!
I’m glad you found it interesting. Blender is newish to me too but I’m bringing 20+ years of rigging experience in other software so I have a bit of a head start! All the best with your journey.
Been teaching myself blender for the last year, geometry nodes is easily a place where I've spent a third of my time. Seeing this method to attach bones to geometry and instance off of that makes this video one I'll probably revisit a few times until I understand as much as I want from it.
This feels like rocket science. Is there no other way to build bird wings? I have a griffin sculpture that I'm busy with and part of me thinks, it will be easier to hand place all the feathers individually.
That’s a totally valid way to go about it - whatever works for your project. I have many bird characters in my film all requiring different numbers and layouts of feathers so this gives me loads of flexibility. Thanks for the comment 👍
That’s a totally valid way to go about it - whatever works for your project. I have many bird characters in my film all requiring different numbers and layouts of feathers so this gives me loads of flexibility. Thanks for the comment 👍
Interesting way of doing it. I see you did it that way to make the feathers curve. Good for cartoons, but for those interested, real feathers don't bend.
Yep. My stuff is generally cartoony so this works for me. I did have to make a more realistic wing for a job recently - it's a very different problem to tackle! Thanks for the comment.
I was so excited to try this tutorial! But I'll be honest and say that I got stuck after 8:35, that's as far as I've reached. It doesn't display the UV map ON the actual wing mesh, so I'm wondering what could I have done wrong, I literally copied everything you did in the video verbatim, but i'll be honest and say that having to map the UV manually so that it goes from 0 to 1 on the map was meticulous and maybe I didn't put a main bone before i started to throw in the individual bones for the wings. I followed very closely tabbing between my rig and your tutorial, so I didn't miss anything on the geometry node map, but I am driving myself nuts and no one else seems to know what I'm doing. Please let me know how I can fix this. I am using ver. 3.6! Thank you so much for your time and this tutorial!
Don’t get disheartened- there are a lot of steps to follow and it’s very easy to miss something along the way. Maybe I didn’t explain one of the steps very clearly also! It’s very hard to know exactly why your setup isn’t working. Have you checked that the name of the uv map attribute on your mesh matches the named attribute you’re using to set position at around 5:15. You could also download the finished example file and try to see what’s different in your scene. Good luck!
@@duncanrudd348 thank you for giving your time to reply! I figured out the issue. So I'm not sure if it's because of 3.6, but in your video and in the file you gave (which btw thank you for that, I didn't know it was there until I looked at the description, thank you for saying) the object info node is set to 'original' and that's what I did. However I switched to 'relative' and it worked! I don't know why, things are a tad different in 3.6. I plan to upgrade to 4.2 but I'm not happy that certain modifiers that come pre installed were removed and you have to manually add them in 😑 ANYWAYS THANK YOU SO MUCH, I LOVE THIS TUTORIAL 🌺
Hey, thanks for the question. If I understand correctly, you should be able to just sample the factor of the feather curves instead of a given specific length. At around 13:30 in the video I explain why we're sampling by length but, in your case, leaving the sample curve node set to factor should do the job. Hope that helps.
Hehe, 24 mins is "long" maybe for ppl that use twitter... I want to buy the Erindale adv GN course but $50 seems like a lot to me, that's equivalent to buying 2 whole reg pizzas... wait, I just invalidated my own point. You are _way_ more skilled than the average bear in GNs, don't sell yourself short. I learned alot from this tutorial.
@@lazyartist6985I've never seen the logical fallacy of Ad Hominem attempted to affect myself and the attacker at the same time. Like peeing in the wind. The reason why I know so much, is because I have no fear of looking stupid. I am, for good or bad a type of idiot savant that doesn't have a cool gift, though I think I got my adv degree in Applied Mathematics and Statistics because of it. Whether I'm seen as an idiot of savant is time sensitive. Initially ppl take me as an idiot, but in a few weeks realize I am a savant. (cliff notes: that's a play on idiot savant too) What may be taken as a stupid question, or comment, comes from a great mind. Just so you know. Think military tested at 99th percentile (that's NOT percent) meaning according to the military test no one tested higher. Given my wife gave me the opportunity, I had a couple of docs I had to use to preempt any shenanigans in Family Court assess me, and unlike most ppl, got them to tell me what they actually thought from their professional training, because we spoke that same medical language and I'm just that funny and entertaining. I thought I may have been on the autistic spectrum and both said no. I used a psychologist of great renown and a psychiatrist I trusted, being trained in another country, not this bullshite sjw/npc/karen campus clown jazz hands collective upside down, left if right (sic) retread for a world perspective. Stay safe and enjoy... I teach ppl willing to listen that: an insult is insulting only if you also agree with it. Furthermore, if a constructive (or not) criticism is seen, I vet it. If it's true, I fix it, if it's false I ignore it. I have found the women of my life the most willing to criticize me and have exposed weaknesses that I have fixed. Most of their criticism were just attempts at soul crushing though, normal intimate terrorist stuff... but men are allowed one intimate terrorist at a time, a gf or a wife. If you don't know what an intimate terrorist is, get married, because soon after you get married you will no longer fear death, but welcome it. At least my wife gave me something! To this day I no longer fear my own death. Thanks for playing. This may help others too.
@@lazyartist6985 That brings up a more sophisticated form of Ad Hominem, "Guilt by Association: This tries to discredit the speaker due to an association with something negative, whether personal or related to their job, friends, family, religion, etc… The Problem: This type of attack tries to undermine the speaker’s credibility and tries to force the audience to question whether what they are hearing is true under false pretense." Still fallacious, still mean spirited, still don't care. Luckily I'm not a sjw/npc or karen, or this would qualify as abusive/hate speech and I could report you to the "authoritehs" as Cartman would say. I just don't care. Too bad you can't add anything to the discussion, and I had time to respond to this because I'm babysitting a render...
Hi Duncan, how are you? I'm having problems with the nodes at 15:24 when I remove that connection, the lines on the wings are cut in half, I did the whole proccess twice but I'm having problems still, do you have any idea what is causing that please? I'm using the newest version of Blender and I'm not using the scene you provided... thanks in advance!
Hiya. Thanks for following along! It's hard to say exactly what your issue might be but it may be that your wing is at a slightly larger scale than mine and that your curves are just not reaching the edge of the wing surface. I have the opposite issue where my feathers are too long for the surface and so all bunch up at the end. I show you how to fix this issue at around 21:20. Hope that helps!
This seems like it might be incredibly useful for my project... If it worked. I followed step by step, but it doesn't work. Following the steps exactly in Blender 4.1 just gives me a mess of polygons
As far as I know there shouldn't be anything stopping the setup from working in 4.1 I'm on 4.2 now and everything seems to work fine... Did you download the finished example file from the description and open that in 4.1? If that file has the same issue you're seeing then maybe there is a missing / deprecated node in 4.1 that I'm not aware of. I'd be interested to know either way. Good luck with your project and thanks for checking out the video.
@@duncanrudd348 Now I tried downloading the example file, and that seems to work. Weird. I'm trying to use the same method as a feather coat on the body of a bird - maybe that's the issue? Still, this is the only tutorial that is even close to what I want, so...
I like your movie title and the about very much. There is definitely room for improvements in humanity and if we could just trust our roots... I think we can but we were given an unavoidable psychosis as part of becoming human and not knowing these evolutionary roots. Are you doing it all by yourself? And you feathering tactics are brilliant. 🦃
Thanks for checking out the project. Yes, it’s a solo effort! I think many of the abilities and instincts that allowed us to become the dominant species are what will be our eventual downfall unless we act fast to change our behaviours.
Take a look into the great Bonobo ape which we have 98.7 percent genetically similarity to and see how their instincts are. Very very interesting in a very very positive way.
I have a question as to how complex you can gat with these feathers. I am trying to achieve a more realistic look by using different textures with transparent backgrounds defining the actual form of the feather and just using slightly modified plans as mesh. Is it possible for each feather distributed this way to have a different material? Or can I distribute those different planes/feathers with this methode somehow?😊
Hey. Thanks for the question. Yes, instead of instancing a single object you can target a collection of feather source meshes. Make sure ‘separate children’ is checked on the collection info node and ‘pick instance’ is enabled on the instancer node . The instances should inherit whatever material is applied to the source meshes so each source can have a different material. Good luck!
Thank you for this, please how did you attach the geometry to the wing amateur or should I say what constraints did you use, please I'm tryto see if I can reproduce something like this, honestly this is so brilliant, thank you again for this piece.
Hey, I'm glad you enjoyed the video. Part 2 goes into detail about how I attached the wing cover geometry to the rig, check it out: th-cam.com/video/Q0q7n13DwzQ/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for your time to reply me I truly appreciate, I have watched this part 2 before now. I'm asking what constraints you use to attach the geometry you work with to the amateur the very beginning .
@@asdamdaniel5718 Ahh, sorry I misunderstood the question. On the vulture character at the beginning, everything apart from the wings is deformed using the standard blender armature modifier and painted vertex group weights.
@UChk6YMvJbqOqfg5kI8_ncUw Not sure I fully understand the question. When you bring a reference to the wing_surface.L into your geometry nodes tree you automatically gain access to its points. " I saw that you set the vertex index for all the wing_surface.L points" - This was the part of the question I wasn't sure about. Do you mean the vertex groups on wing_surface.L? If so, those are where the weighting information is stored so each point knows how much influence to take from the bones in the armature. Geometry nodes doesn't need to know about these.
@@duncanrudd348 I see, the vertex groups only for the bone, i replay the tutorial for several time to understand it before go to part 2. Thanks for your answer, it help me alot 🙏
This is really awesome stuff Duncan. I just set this up for a goose that ive been working on. I am pretty new to blender though and I'm trying to integrate it into the the way ive been doing things. I have been using animations from mixamo and retargeting bones. Do you know of any simple way of doing this with the geo nodes setup this way? Thanks! - Vol
Update= I figured out how to get the animation retargeting to work, , I parented the wing armature to the body armature so it all stays together, but the thing I need to figure out is how to get the opposite wing that is currently "mirrored" to have its own armature and geo node structure. Is it as simple as making the mirror its own object and duplicating the geo node structure? Any help you (or anyone else) can provide would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Hey. Thanks so much for the kind words - glad you were able to make some progress. In my finished rig there's only one armature which contains all the bones and controls for the character. Each wing has it's own geometry nodes modifier but they both reference the same node tree. One thing I'm not sure I mentioned in the tutorial is that you'll need to expose inputs for both the wing reference and surface meshes - that's as simple as dragging from the orange input port on the object info node to the empty port at the bottom of a group input node. That will allow you to specify different meshes for the left and right wings without needing a duplicate node tree. Hope that makes sense!
@@duncanrudd348 I am just scratching the surface with nodes and it's beginning to make a little sense to me but what you just said is still way above my level. Messing around with it over the past few days has given me deeper insight into how it all works and I was able to duplicate the trees and the mesh's and have both left and right armatures to retarget my animations. It took me like 3 days of dorking around but I finally got there. At some point I may try to simplify it and get fancier with the node structure but Im happy with where it sits for now. The only issue in trying to solve is how to keep the mesh from walking through itself like a ghost through a wall, like when the wings fold in front his legs stick out. Is there anything you recommend for that like some sort of constraint or mask for the mesh? Thanks again.
@@THEVOL Stick at it. It's not easy at first but Geo nodes is such a powerful system. Regarding the folded wing, I'm afraid I don't have a simple fix. It's a notoriously difficult thing to achieve in character rigging / posing and takes a lot of manual tweaking / management of the controls. Many setups opt for a blend where there is literally a different mesh / groom for the folded version of the wing which gets swapped out during the transition from open to folded. Don't get down-hearted, this stuff is hard and it sounds like you're making great progress 🤘
@@duncanrudd348 I thought about that as a solution too. I just found out about collisions physics and I think that's where I need to look to solve this problem- otherwise I think I'm good with where the design it right now. I have a list of characters I need to design and once they're all "done" I can tweak them and improve them over time. Thank you for your help.
What I dont understand is that ppl keep exusing themselfs for not beeing an expert and showing stuff I could never do myself. For me you ARE an EXPERT! Thanks for this cool tutorial!!!! How come you left maya and got to blender? I left Lightwave as it pi$$ed me off so many time not making what it was intended to do. Blender is much more riliable.
Thanks for the kind words! I haven’t left Maya - I still make my living as a freelance Maya artist. For my personal projects though Blender is a really enabling creative tool.
Yeah, I just posed the folded wing using the rig. I’m cheating a lot though by having the wing geo completely separate from the body - that makes it much easier!
@@duncanrudd348 great solution men, I mean it is a quick procedural wing. It have some limit but easier to iterate and generate any variety of wings. How did you make the covert feathers?
If you mean the downloadable blender files and the techniques described in the video, sure. Go ahead. If you mean the video itself or the vulture character design then no, I’m afraid not. Good luck!
Sorry, i will clarify, i want to follow the steps and create the wings for a commercial project. I try to make the rig from scratch and not use your "Tutorial start scene" blend file but i can't seem to get the rig to act like how your rig works so that's why i'm asking since i have to use the blend scene in order to follow the techniques in the vid.@@duncanrudd348
Hello there, sorry just asking if there any way to reach your for some questions about the bird wing rig other then youtube comment section. I would like to share some of my attempt on your set up.
Sorry my friend, I don’t really have enough time to go through setups on an individual basis - I get quite a lot of requests like this. Happy to try and answer as many questions as I can in the comments as that way everyone can potentially benefit from them.
@@duncanrudd348 I understand, I respect people privacy and time, I guess I will try my best to solve it. just wonder is it better to split the plane of the primary and secondary feather set to make the folding overlap more during folding. Right now the feather formation will break of I try to bend the wing surface to much. How did you overcome this in your final wing model?
I’ll address this in part 2. The vulture wing has a few layers of feathers starting and ending in different spots and with some space between them on the y axis.
![ポリゴンモデルの関節の分割線 [肘と膝や指など一方方向に曲がる関節の分割方法]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7DAFS8sga2k/mqdefault.jpg)
Thanks for the kind words. Really glad you found it useful.
This is super interesting! Adding all the layers of feathers, randomising their scale, instancing from a collection.
I may give this a try, thank you!
BEST VIDEO ON WING MECHANICS ON TH-cam!
Hah - not sure about that but thanks for the kind words!
This is incredible! I've tried a bird rig before but not like this. Might try it to learn all the sampling stuff in geonodes. Thank you!
You’re very welcome. Hope you find the techniques useful!
Alright, not a master at the subject in any way close to Duncan, but when I 'unsquished' my feathers in the geo nodes at around 21:12, I had them pointing inwards instead of outwards, and I also had the Multiply node set the feathers so long their tips were omitted. I couldn't fix any of that playing around with the vector maths without fumbling in the dark, haha, so I instead recommend that anybody with the same problems as me play around with the original feather mesh IN EDIT MODE (just transforming it in object mode will not help). I moved it around, scaled it and such, and then I was able to achieve the desired result. It did ruin the 0 to 1 size thing, but...
Thanks again for such invaluable knowledge, and I know I'm really stepping out of my league here as someone who doesn't often use Geometry Nodes, I just think I might be able to help someone who's using a different setup (Blender 4.2 here, did not use the scene included in the description) like me.
Hah - great solution. If it works, it’s correct. Glad you figured out how to get it working for your scene. 👍
Amazing work, very clear explanation. Looking forward to the follow up tutorial.
Thanks! Part 2 should be up this week.
I also have a gryphon I’m modeling, and this also makes me wanna handplace my feathers… BUT I am going to be strong, and at least try to use the scene you provided!
Sadly the feathers are intended for an environment that does not preserve the geometry nodes, but this is such an elegant way to construct them and set their curves. I can’t wait to give it a shot! When I work by hand I’m always like “Okay. I can ‘say’ this with ten feathers.” but I’m really looking forward to bedecking my model with a more accurate amount :D
Cool. I hope it goes well!
Gorgeous work!
Wow! That means an awful lot coming from you. Thanks Erin!
just what I was looking for, thanks so much!
Thanks for the comment - glad you found it helpful.
Great tutorial! Easy to follow. Looking forward to more tuts.
Cheers! Glad you enjoyed it.
Hey buddy nice to hear your voice some 20 years later
Crikey I know. Where’s it gone eh?
Thank you for this beautiful tutorial!
You’re very welcome. Glad you liked it.
Just brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! What more can I say? Thank you! Dg
You’re welcome. Thank you!
This is so fantastic! Thank you for sharing this wing rig in Geometry Nodes.
I’m really glad you liked it!
I don't know when and how I already subscribed to this wonderful channel
I'm quite the Blender newb and only use it for fun, so this is technically beyond my level - but it's such great insights and an obviously elegant solution!! Hope to see and learn more from you in the future!
I’m glad you found it interesting. Blender is newish to me too but I’m bringing 20+ years of rigging experience in other software so I have a bit of a head start! All the best with your journey.
cool! great explanations of concepts
Cheers!
非常棒的教程，谢谢！
Thanks! Never would‘ve thought about using the UVMap. This makes much more sense than my (failed) approach. 😅
I'm sure there are other ways you could approach it. Geometry Nodes opens up so many possibilities!
Such a great application of GN, thanks a lot for the insights! (long time Maya user here too :) )
Cheers! Glad it was interesting. Good luck with your blender journey.
Thank you, good job
Been teaching myself blender for the last year, geometry nodes is easily a place where I've spent a third of my time.
Seeing this method to attach bones to geometry and instance off of that makes this video one I'll probably revisit a few times until I understand as much as I want from it.
Cool. Glad you found it interesting! I wish you all the best on your blender journey.
This feels like rocket science. Is there no other way to build bird wings? I have a griffin sculpture that I'm busy with and part of me thinks, it will be easier to hand place all the feathers individually.
That’s a totally valid way to go about it - whatever works for your project. I have many bird characters in my film all requiring different numbers and layouts of feathers so this gives me loads of flexibility.
Thanks for the comment 👍
That’s a totally valid way to go about it - whatever works for your project. I have many bird characters in my film all requiring different numbers and layouts of feathers so this gives me loads of flexibility.
Thanks for the comment 👍
Demasiado bueno, esta perfecto para muchos ejemplos
Thank you 🙏 glad you enjoyed it!
Interesting way of doing it. I see you did it that way to make the feathers curve. Good for cartoons, but for those interested, real feathers don't bend.
Yep. My stuff is generally cartoony so this works for me. I did have to make a more realistic wing for a job recently - it's a very different problem to tackle! Thanks for the comment.
I was so excited to try this tutorial! But I'll be honest and say that I got stuck after 8:35, that's as far as I've reached. It doesn't display the UV map ON the actual wing mesh, so I'm wondering what could I have done wrong, I literally copied everything you did in the video verbatim, but i'll be honest and say that having to map the UV manually so that it goes from 0 to 1 on the map was meticulous and maybe I didn't put a main bone before i started to throw in the individual bones for the wings. I followed very closely tabbing between my rig and your tutorial, so I didn't miss anything on the geometry node map, but I am driving myself nuts and no one else seems to know what I'm doing. Please let me know how I can fix this. I am using ver. 3.6! Thank you so much for your time and this tutorial!
Don’t get disheartened- there are a lot of steps to follow and it’s very easy to miss something along the way. Maybe I didn’t explain one of the steps very clearly also! It’s very hard to know exactly why your setup isn’t working. Have you checked that the name of the uv map attribute on your mesh matches the named attribute you’re using to set position at around 5:15. You could also download the finished example file and try to see what’s different in your scene. Good luck!
@@duncanrudd348 thank you for giving your time to reply! I figured out the issue. So I'm not sure if it's because of 3.6, but in your video and in the file you gave (which btw thank you for that, I didn't know it was there until I looked at the description, thank you for saying) the object info node is set to 'original' and that's what I did. However I switched to 'relative' and it worked! I don't know why, things are a tad different in 3.6. I plan to upgrade to 4.2 but I'm not happy that certain modifiers that come pre installed were removed and you have to manually add them in 😑
ANYWAYS THANK YOU SO MUCH, I LOVE THIS TUTORIAL 🌺
Question, if I wanted the feathers to stretch to the underlying mesh, what would I change?
Hey, thanks for the question. If I understand correctly, you should be able to just sample the factor of the feather curves instead of a given specific length. At around 13:30 in the video I explain why we're sampling by length but, in your case, leaving the sample curve node set to factor should do the job. Hope that helps.
Hehe, 24 mins is "long" maybe for ppl that use twitter... I want to buy the Erindale adv GN course but $50 seems like a lot to me, that's equivalent to buying 2 whole reg pizzas... wait, I just invalidated my own point.
You are _way_ more skilled than the average bear in GNs, don't sell yourself short. I learned alot from this tutorial.
i saw you before with those lame coments but hey i am just like you hehe
@@lazyartist6985I've never seen the logical fallacy of Ad Hominem attempted to affect myself and the attacker at the same time. Like peeing in the wind.
The reason why I know so much, is because I have no fear of looking stupid. I am, for good or bad a type of idiot savant that doesn't have a cool gift, though I think I got my adv degree in Applied Mathematics and Statistics because of it. Whether I'm seen as an idiot of savant is time sensitive. Initially ppl take me as an idiot, but in a few weeks realize I am a savant. (cliff notes: that's a play on idiot savant too)
What may be taken as a stupid question, or comment, comes from a great mind. Just so you know. Think military tested at 99th percentile (that's NOT percent) meaning according to the military test no one tested higher.
Given my wife gave me the opportunity, I had a couple of docs I had to use to preempt any shenanigans in Family Court assess me, and unlike most ppl, got them to tell me what they actually thought from their professional training, because we spoke that same medical language and I'm just that funny and entertaining.
I thought I may have been on the autistic spectrum and both said no. I used a psychologist of great renown and a psychiatrist I trusted, being trained in another country, not this bullshite sjw/npc/karen campus clown jazz hands collective upside down, left if right (sic) retread for a world perspective.
Stay safe and enjoy... I teach ppl willing to listen that: an insult is insulting only if you also agree with it. Furthermore, if a constructive (or not) criticism is seen, I vet it. If it's true, I fix it, if it's false I ignore it. I have found the women of my life the most willing to criticize me and have exposed weaknesses that I have fixed. Most of their criticism were just attempts at soul crushing though, normal intimate terrorist stuff... but men are allowed one intimate terrorist at a time, a gf or a wife.
If you don't know what an intimate terrorist is, get married, because soon after you get married you will no longer fear death, but welcome it.
At least my wife gave me something! To this day I no longer fear my own death.
Thanks for playing. This may help others too.
@@jeffreyspinner5437 you think i will read all that crap lol
@@lazyartist6985 That brings up a more sophisticated form of Ad Hominem,
"Guilt by Association:
This tries to discredit the speaker due to an association with something negative, whether personal or related to their job, friends, family, religion, etc…
The Problem: This type of attack tries to undermine the speaker’s credibility and tries to force the audience to question whether what they are hearing is true under false pretense."
Still fallacious, still mean spirited, still don't care. Luckily I'm not a sjw/npc or karen, or this would qualify as abusive/hate speech and I could report you to the "authoritehs" as Cartman would say.
I just don't care. Too bad you can't add anything to the discussion, and I had time to respond to this because I'm babysitting a render...
Hi Duncan, how are you? I'm having problems with the nodes at 15:24 when I remove that connection, the lines on the wings are cut in half, I did the whole proccess twice but I'm having problems still, do you have any idea what is causing that please? I'm using the newest version of Blender and I'm not using the scene you provided... thanks in advance!
Hiya. Thanks for following along! It's hard to say exactly what your issue might be but it may be that your wing is at a slightly larger scale than mine and that your curves are just not reaching the edge of the wing surface. I have the opposite issue where my feathers are too long for the surface and so all bunch up at the end. I show you how to fix this issue at around 21:20. Hope that helps!
This seems like it might be incredibly useful for my project... If it worked. I followed step by step, but it doesn't work. Following the steps exactly in Blender 4.1 just gives me a mess of polygons
As far as I know there shouldn't be anything stopping the setup from working in 4.1 I'm on 4.2 now and everything seems to work fine... Did you download the finished example file from the description and open that in 4.1? If that file has the same issue you're seeing then maybe there is a missing / deprecated node in 4.1 that I'm not aware of. I'd be interested to know either way.
Good luck with your project and thanks for checking out the video.
@@duncanrudd348 Now I tried downloading the example file, and that seems to work. Weird. I'm trying to use the same method as a feather coat on the body of a bird - maybe that's the issue? Still, this is the only tutorial that is even close to what I want, so...
I like your movie title and the about very much. There is definitely room for improvements in humanity and if we could just trust our roots... I think we can but we were given an unavoidable psychosis as part of becoming human and not knowing these evolutionary roots. Are you doing it all by yourself?
And you feathering tactics are brilliant. 🦃
Thanks for checking out the project. Yes, it’s a solo effort! I think many of the abilities and instincts that allowed us to become the dominant species are what will be our eventual downfall unless we act fast to change our behaviours.
Take a look into the great Bonobo ape which we have 98.7 percent genetically similarity to and see how their instincts are. Very very interesting in a very very positive way.
@@petneb Thanks. I will.
I have a question as to how complex you can gat with these feathers. I am trying to achieve a more realistic look by using different textures with transparent backgrounds defining the actual form of the feather and just using slightly modified plans as mesh. Is it possible for each feather distributed this way to have a different material? Or can I distribute those different planes/feathers with this methode somehow?😊
Hey. Thanks for the question. Yes, instead of instancing a single object you can target a collection of feather source meshes. Make sure ‘separate children’ is checked on the collection info node and ‘pick instance’ is enabled on the instancer node . The instances should inherit whatever material is applied to the source meshes so each source can have a different material. Good luck!
@@duncanrudd348 thanks for the answer! I'll try that :)
Thank you for this, please how did you attach the geometry to the wing amateur or should I say what constraints did you use, please I'm tryto see if I can reproduce something like this, honestly this is so brilliant, thank you again for this piece.
Hey, I'm glad you enjoyed the video. Part 2 goes into detail about how I attached the wing cover geometry to the rig, check it out: th-cam.com/video/Q0q7n13DwzQ/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for your time to reply me I truly appreciate, I have watched this part 2 before now. I'm asking what constraints you use to attach the geometry you work with to the amateur the very beginning .
@@asdamdaniel5718 Ahh, sorry I misunderstood the question. On the vulture character at the beginning, everything apart from the wings is deformed using the standard blender armature modifier and painted vertex group weights.
Thanks
You're welcome
@UChk6YMvJbqOqfg5kI8_ncUw Not sure I fully understand the question. When you bring a reference to the wing_surface.L into your geometry nodes tree you automatically gain access to its points. " I saw that you set the vertex index for all the wing_surface.L points" - This was the part of the question I wasn't sure about. Do you mean the vertex groups on wing_surface.L? If so, those are where the weighting information is stored so each point knows how much influence to take from the bones in the armature. Geometry nodes doesn't need to know about these.
@@duncanrudd348 I see, the vertex groups only for the bone, i replay the tutorial for several time to understand it before go to part 2. Thanks for your answer, it help me alot 🙏
@@bllendixuniverse3340 Cool - hope you get it all figured out!
This is really awesome stuff Duncan. I just set this up for a goose that ive been working on. I am pretty new to blender though and I'm trying to integrate it into the the way ive been doing things. I have been using animations from mixamo and retargeting bones. Do you know of any simple way of doing this with the geo nodes setup this way? Thanks! - Vol
Update= I figured out how to get the animation retargeting to work, , I parented the wing armature to the body armature so it all stays together, but the thing I need to figure out is how to get the opposite wing that is currently "mirrored" to have its own armature and geo node structure. Is it as simple as making the mirror its own object and duplicating the geo node structure? Any help you (or anyone else) can provide would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Hey. Thanks so much for the kind words - glad you were able to make some progress. In my finished rig there's only one armature which contains all the bones and controls for the character. Each wing has it's own geometry nodes modifier but they both reference the same node tree. One thing I'm not sure I mentioned in the tutorial is that you'll need to expose inputs for both the wing reference and surface meshes - that's as simple as dragging from the orange input port on the object info node to the empty port at the bottom of a group input node. That will allow you to specify different meshes for the left and right wings without needing a duplicate node tree.
Hope that makes sense!
@@duncanrudd348 I am just scratching the surface with nodes and it's beginning to make a little sense to me but what you just said is still way above my level. Messing around with it over the past few days has given me deeper insight into how it all works and I was able to duplicate the trees and the mesh's and have both left and right armatures to retarget my animations. It took me like 3 days of dorking around but I finally got there. At some point I may try to simplify it and get fancier with the node structure but Im happy with where it sits for now. The only issue in trying to solve is how to keep the mesh from walking through itself like a ghost through a wall, like when the wings fold in front his legs stick out. Is there anything you recommend for that like some sort of constraint or mask for the mesh? Thanks again.
@@THEVOL Stick at it. It's not easy at first but Geo nodes is such a powerful system. Regarding the folded wing, I'm afraid I don't have a simple fix. It's a notoriously difficult thing to achieve in character rigging / posing and takes a lot of manual tweaking / management of the controls. Many setups opt for a blend where there is literally a different mesh / groom for the folded version of the wing which gets swapped out during the transition from open to folded. Don't get down-hearted, this stuff is hard and it sounds like you're making great progress 🤘
@@duncanrudd348 I thought about that as a solution too. I just found out about collisions physics and I think that's where I need to look to solve this problem- otherwise I think I'm good with where the design it right now. I have a list of characters I need to design and once they're all "done" I can tweak them and improve them over time. Thank you for your help.
oh wow
What I dont understand is that ppl keep exusing themselfs for not beeing an expert and showing stuff I could never do myself. For me you ARE an EXPERT! Thanks for this cool tutorial!!!! How come you left maya and got to blender? I left Lightwave as it pi$$ed me off so many time not making what it was intended to do. Blender is much more riliable.
Thanks for the kind words! I haven’t left Maya - I still make my living as a freelance Maya artist. For my personal projects though Blender is a really enabling creative tool.
Awesome man, how did you pose the folded wing version then, Do you manually pose and adjust the rig?
Yeah, I just posed the folded wing using the rig. I’m cheating a lot though by having the wing geo completely separate from the body - that makes it much easier!
@@duncanrudd348 great solution men, I mean it is a quick procedural wing. It have some limit but easier to iterate and generate any variety of wings. How did you make the covert feathers?
I’ll explain the covert piece in a second video - hopefully this week sometime.
@@duncanrudd348 Great, looking forward for it. Is your personal movie done with Blender then? I see Tanked is made with Maya.
@@gart2922 Yep, Tanked was in Maya, I made another film earlier this year which was animated in Maya, rendered in Blender, Deep Rooted is all Blender!
感谢分享
Can i use this for commercial projects?
If you mean the downloadable blender files and the techniques described in the video, sure. Go ahead. If you mean the video itself or the vulture character design then no, I’m afraid not.
Good luck!
Sorry, i will clarify, i want to follow the steps and create the wings for a commercial project. I try to make the rig from scratch and not use your "Tutorial start scene" blend file but i can't seem to get the rig to act like how your rig works so that's why i'm asking since i have to use the blend scene in order to follow the techniques in the vid.@@duncanrudd348
In that case, go for it. Feel free to use the downloadable blend files in your project - hope it goes well@@blenderbender2335
Thank you :)@@duncanrudd348
Hello there, sorry just asking if there any way to reach your for some questions about the bird wing rig other then youtube comment section. I would like to share some of my attempt on your set up.
Sorry my friend, I don’t really have enough time to go through setups on an individual basis - I get quite a lot of requests like this. Happy to try and answer as many questions as I can in the comments as that way everyone can potentially benefit from them.
@@duncanrudd348 I understand, I respect people privacy and time, I guess I will try my best to solve it. just wonder is it better to split the plane of the primary and secondary feather set to make the folding overlap more during folding. Right now the feather formation will break of I try to bend the wing surface to much. How did you overcome this in your final wing model?
@@duncanrudd348 also I just read my comment again and I am so sorry if I sounds demanding in any kind of way.
I’ll address this in part 2. The vulture wing has a few layers of feathers starting and ending in different spots and with some space between them on the y axis.