hi all,

i have been trying to build a flying parrot animal with poser and failing miserably.

it just has to take off, flap its wings a couple of times, fly around the screen and then leave it.

what do i do first?
make it fly by defining poses
or
make it follow a walk path and then define keyframes for the wings

any help would be appreciated
thanks in advance
mackill

I would start with it in one place and work out the leg and wing motions first. The parrot would need to launch off it's perch so I'd start with the legs and wings during the launch. I imagine it would squat down to prepare to jump up and start extending it's wings as it did so (although I'm no expert on bird movements so I'm just guessing). Once it got it's wings extended and it's body is in a flying pose, I'd do one cycle of the flapping and tweak that until I got it as smoothly as I desired. Then I'd copy and paste the keyframes repeatedly along the timeline so the wings would continue to flap repeatedly. Once the wings were moving as desired, then, and only then would I move the parrot around on the screen. By doing it like this, I can move the cameras as much as I need to see the take off and flapping and then move them back into place to work out the full scene - in other words I'm focused on only one aspect of the animation at a time.

I dunno how to do it, but I'd like to see any bird animations. the process of taking off (launching) is intricate, the motion of the wings is a complex "4-stroke" pattern, and landing is even harder to simulate IMVHO. I have seen some attempts at bird animaton that looked like one of those wind-up bird toys, but never anything realistic.

Get some bread, go to the park, put your video camera down on the ground and start to toss some bread in front of it.

Rent Disney's Alladin.

Legs & body squash with anticipation of raised wings on the bottom of the squash, quick push off and lowered wings at top of stretch. Repeat wing cycle with legs folding and tail spreading, twisting opposite to body flex. 

Think in terms of multiple camera angles: close shot for takeoff, wider shot for first leg of flight, widest shot for circling and leaving frame. That way you'll have more flexibility in how you handle the background vs. the parrot & any foreground objects. Remember a bird flying in place with the background being animated will be visually the same as a fixed background and moving bird which will be much harder to get right.

HTH

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Attached Link: http://imagesvr.library.upenn.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?type=detail&cc=pennarchive&entryid=X-20041220002&viewid=1&sstrt=15&hits=85&q1=muybridge&cat1=All%20Categories&thsz=12&txsz=50&slsz=1&med=&quality=extra%20large&ts=&c=pennarchive

Also:

and plate 759 might be of some assistance.

 

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I can't find the link at the moment, but there is also the raptor flight camera project being run in Scotland, which has streaming videos off of twin digital cameras that they attach to eagles for wing motion study. I -think- the Nature channel on cable has the info on the project, so it may be on their website. But there are dynamics of motion that you have to see to understand....

Attached Link: Towards Walk Paths for Props

Hi Mackill. Whilst I think you would probably have to do the takeoff frame by frame by hand, I think a walk path could be the way to go for the flight path after that. I have come up with a system for such flight paths that uses two walk paths, one used as normal to define the path over the ground, and another used to define the up/down motion. See the link above for more details of my "Walker3D". I won't say that this is easy to do, but I find it a lot easier than trying to key in the whole flight path by hand. After reading your post I made a quick attempt at a bird in flight using Walker3D. I really have no idea how a birds wings move in flight, and I didn't even attampt a takeoff, so its not very good, but perhaps it gives you an idea of what can be achived using walk paths. As to the flapping wings, I made a one cycle flap and saved it as a 5 frame animated pose, I then moved to frame #6 and applyed the pose again, moved to frame #11 applyed the pose again, then saved all this as a new animated pose, then just kept applying this pose till the end of the animation. The pose also included a slight upwards movement of the bird's "hip" on the down stroke of the wings. The flapping pose can be added either before or after you do the walk cycles. The banking from side to side was added by hand as the last stage in the animation. If you have any questions on this method, feel free to ask away, I will do my best to help.

not bad, les!