Butterfly wing test - Rough

It needs some inbetweens and some tweaking, but so far, so good.

Butterfly Wing Flutter Plans

Went crazy looking for a good way to animate this butterfly flying. Left plenty of room for overlap, broke a few joints, picked out strong poses and an interesting breakdown. I condensed it down to a classic run on 6's- where drawings 1 and 7 are close. I put the body on a different chart than the wings, just for some variation.

Planning my poses

Just planning some of my key poses for this little animation I'm putting together. My plans have changed a little bit over the past few days and I'm trying to organize my thoughts.

Eric Goldberg Talks About Ken Harris

I found this video digging around You Tube. I've ripped off so many charts from Ken Harris- he's my favorite animator of all time. The Animator' s Survival Kit is a Ken Harris/Art Babbitt animation chart goldmine. Animators spread rumors about where to get notes, who has the notes, who wrote stuff down. Because it is valuable information. There are legends of reams of Art Babbitt notes floating around- I'm telling you, read the Animator's Survival Kit. It will save a lot of time, the charts apply to everything, and it's already been proven to work. Memorize some basic charts, draw well, and read all the notes you can. Start with Dick Williams and then go straight to Stanchfield.

Some Ken Harris art- I like looking at this kind of thing. And here is a picture of the master. Pretty intense expression...

Additions to DinoRig

I didn't want the teeth to look very menacing since I consider this little guy to be a baby. The tongue is a little loud, but everything works. Setting up a GUI for the blendshapes and tongue control and it's off to the races.

Animation Time

Still ironing out problems with the butter fly rig. The MEL script for the wing flutter is giving me headaches. The lizard rig is WIP as well. I'm working out some teeth and tongue issues, and the blendshapes are non-existent. I atleast want some basic emotion to work with. Right now the jaw opens and shuts... and that is about it. The body is okay. Thinking seriously about gutting this rig and starting over. The butterfly is so small, a few issues won't really matter (which is why it lacks a normal map and some of the other things 3d models normally have). But the lizard, my main squeeze for this sequence, needs some personality. I'm already planning my shots for this animation, and I'll likely post some of my planning.

Butterfly screenshots

Posed the butterfly in some paint effects grass and branches in maya. Still trying to figure out the MEL script. Digging through the outliner, mostly, trying to make syntax jive. What a pain... may give up on it and do it the old fashioned way.

Butterfly rig

Wanted a flying animal rig and finally broke down and made myself one. Decided on a butterfly over a bird mainly because of billows in the wings and advanced rig things that I'm not prepared to try yet. Modeled a lot of the mesh myself, but got some help on the legs and body tweaks from modeler Heather Berry. The texture I threw on there just for the visual. There is nothing special about it.
The rig is a modified advanced skeleton file. I used the quadruped setup and then added the extra legs, the antennae, the wings (there are four) and joints for the proboscis. The legs are separate pieces, as are the wings. Plan to use this in an animation soon. Looking to check out a MEL script I've found for wing flutter- hope it works out.

Caricature Painted