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Hummingbird
So I’m working on a project that requires a hummingbird to be animated. Remembering Rabinowitz’s bird tutorial from way back i think, no problem right. Well…. wrong, once I dove in I’m noticing that even if I cycle the wings positions one frame apart and i add some fast blur mixed with motion blur it still doesn’t seem quite right, still a bit jerky. I’m also thinking I’m going to need to animate the head and tail to move fluidly as the bird whips from one position to another. Like being dragged behind in essence as the wings would be the force that moves the bird. For that i was thinking a subtle warp might do the trick. Since the client wants the bird elements to come from a provided painting, everything has to be cut out into layers from photoshop, not that big a deal. but i’ll cross that when i get too it. Right now does anyone have any ideas to make for a more fluid rapid wing movement to fit that of a hummingbird? I do realize its probably going to look a bit flat, but it will be quite small for the most part….
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6 Replies
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Have you check out stock footage, and frozen some frames to get an idea?
https://www.fotosearch.com/video-footage/hummingbird.html
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If you watch actual hummingbird footage, I think you will find that the wings twist up and down as they flap too. If you put the anchor point of the wing flap layers at the forefront (“shoulder”) of the wing, you can rotate on that axis as well, adding to the effect.
Also, if you are doing the wing flapping in a pre-comp, you might want to extend/slow the timeline, add a more pronounced motion blur (i.e. echo effect), and then time-remap it back to fast speed. If your flaps go faster than the frame rate, then you won’t get any usable blur the regular way, because it won’t have enough frames to sample.
This way you will get a more natural representation of that wing lag on the twist, and the more pronounced blur that occurs with super-fast hummingbird wing flapping. Of course there will be a bit of a premium in terms of render time…
Brian
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Yeah, that makes sense actually. Yeah the wings do flap in more of a figure 8 motion, giving the whole hover ability.
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I wouldn’t waste processor and render time on making a solid move fast enough to take advantage of AE’s Motion Blur. Rather, make a blurry shape that pulsates slightly and position it appropriately.
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I would agree with Ian. Just check out some hummingbird footage and make a few blurry shapes for the wings, sequence them and then loop them.
-E
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I third the motion. Fake it with maybe three blurry stills and loop them.
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