-
iwkya 61 posts
Hey guys,
I have my character all rigged, and am about to add a backpack of sorts onto his back with the intention of it transforming and sprouting two plane type wings from the sides. Now, i am a modeler and very new to animation so i was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how to animate this. The scene is my character jumps from a building, free falls a while, spins around a bit the wings (not bird like) sprout from the pack with some rocket engines at the bottom, then just blasts away.
The particles etc im not worries about for now, just the transform from pack with no wings to with wings, should i use a Morph target or...?
Thanks
-
JayG 1,164 posts
You could probably use multiple morph targets and blend through them for the transformation. If you only used one you wouldn't have much if any control over how it looked. But if you create say 6-10 morphs and animate the blend between them you could probably get a pretty sweet result. Seeings how you're a modeler and could accurately create the "in-between" morphs I think that would be a fun solution.
-
iwkya 61 posts
Thanks for the reply..
To test i used one MT and about 8 progresses, it looked exactly how i wanted after animating it from 0 to 100 over 40 frames. I am going to re do it though using multiple MT's so i have more control. I did try this before but didn't spend any time on it and although when positioning my wings folding in etc was exact, when i went through the sequence many or the targets were interfering with each other and creating anomalies such as show the back side of polies etc.
If anyone has done a kind of collapsing transformer animation, would you recomment any technique for collapsing your model in while keeping all the polies ?
Thanks
-
JayG 1,164 posts
The topology on the all of the morphs including the original would have to be pretty close to the same in order for there to be no weird poly issues. That's where the delicacy comes in though. Someone else who has done it before might be able to offer some help beyond that. GL though, sounds cool.
-
JayG 1,164 posts
I was thinking about this more today about how you could do it with morphs only..
I think you'd have an easier time if you modeled the final end mesh, and then used that and worked backwards in to your backpack. The backpack might look a little funky and be super high poly but you'll have a much easier time in the end with the same poly count and point count.
-
iwkya 61 posts
I ended up modeling the complete mesh and reworking it backwards, but thanks for the post.
I used one MT channel only but 16 different MT targets in the progression list. The final result was really great and i would recommend it. Yes using many channels would of gave me more flexibility, but its a cartoony anim and i only needed it to morth one way, so woho

.. Thanks for the replies guys..
-
JayG 1,164 posts
Yeah thats what I meant, one channel, but many targets. Glad it worked, can we see it? =)
-
iwkya 61 posts
Yea sure, i have a test render i'll upload in a sec.......