Maya Wing Rigging Tutorial Using nCloth Simulation


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This tutorial will show you how to rig the wing of a dragon or bat whilst using a cloth simulation to add realistic animation to the wing membranes.

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39 responses to “Maya Wing Rigging Tutorial Using nCloth Simulation”

  1. It all went well until I did the wrap. Now it's all…screwy…the only difference (besides model) is that thew nconstraints are on two different pieces of geometry… (the wing arm and the character's torso)

  2. Hi Alex, I do exactly the same as shown in your video; I have a full dragon mesh, and I only need the ncloth wrapped on the membranes; but when I do that, all the mesh receive the wrap, and the funny thing is that I have a low poly mesh with membranes separated just like you; could you give me some help? cheers

  3. When I set up wings, instead of using component constraint, I skin the proxy mesh to the joints very roughly. Don't even need to paint weights. Then, I convert the object to nCloth and go to paint vertex attributes. Flood the whole object with 0 value and then with a brush paint 100% influence around the joints. The whole process takes about a minute. Another option involves duplicating the skinned proxy, turning the copy into an nCloth and constraining it to the skinned original with "Attract to matching mesh" constraint. Then vertex weights can be painted. The 2nd option is better if you anticipate making changes to the skinned object, without having to re-create nCloth over again.

  4. Hello mr Twigg
    Thank you for the tutorial, it has helped so much and you've earned a sub, but i am confused about one thing. Are the wings and the skeletal frame still two seperate objects, with seperate UVs? I am just wondering how to go about the texturing :/
    thank you 🙂

  5. Great. You solve my problem. I was trying other thing here, to have the cloth animation baked, so i can delete all nucleus stuff, and kept the vertex animation itself, to use on Unity3d game. That wrap thing sove everything. Thank you man!

  6. this is an extremely helpful tutorial! I have a dragon in my student film, and until I found this I had rigged the skin membrane the same as the body. As you can expect it made things look stiff and there was a lot of clipping. I though my flexibility with the character was lost, until I found this, and I have been able to redo the wings with this method. 

  7. Couldn't you just create a separate mesh for the ncloth wings parts, weight their edges to the joints, and then create an ncloth from those and use input mesh attract painting to stick their edges to the joints? That way you only need to simulate cloth for a few meshes, and you don't need to use constraints. Or would that cause a problem with double sided meshes? But then I imagine you could wrap the double sides mesh to the single sided n-cloth wing mesh. 
    Just throwing out ideas. Your technique definitely works in a number of circumstances. 

  8. okay I'm trying to make a replica of the Dragon called skrill. I haven't been able to watch your full video because I ran out of data but how do you attach the flashy wing part to the bone structure? and do you need to have a joint it out first for the wings to work properly or can it be done in any order

  9. Hey there, just another guy who happened upon your tutorial, speaking. I have to say while it's quite excellent how you devised this method, information provided here isn't complete.

    The video tells me how to create a wing with the membrane simulating cloth and wrap it around a continuous wing mesh, but it doesn't say anything at all about wrapping around an entire character. When I applied it to a cartoon-y dragon I had made (as a test without the joints and controls, just pasted across files), the rest of the model just crumpled around the wing as it moved.

    In addition to this, I'm pretty sure there are other complication that need to be addressed as well. I appreciate any sort of helpful response, especially from the OP.

    Thanks

  10. Hey this is a great tutorial

    just a quick note to add, you said that you couldn't add ncloth to specific polys on the geometry. Well this isn't strictly true, you can apply ncloth to the whole geometry turn it's input cloth attract to 1 and then using the paint ncloth brush paint the input attract weight 1 = no cloth and 0= full Ncloth sim !

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