Rigging complete

The rigging of the magpie is now complete.

The bird has numerous movements:
- It has a breath function, this will add a realism and emotion to the bird
- Wings open and close, this was the hardest aspect of designing the bird
- Full head, tail and leg movement
- Blink and beak open/close
- claws can open, close and dangle when flying

The movements are a mixture of blendshapes, set driven keys and manual controls.

Below is a test animation showing the movement of the bird, the rig has been refined again after this render to remove the few mistakes.

Below is the skeleton of the bird

When painting weights on the bird i realised that weights are essentially moved around when painting. If the are removed from a joint then they will be moved to another joint. For this reason I found it best to paint weights at around 0.5 - 0.7 as painting weights at 1 often gave a rigid bend and made the weights jump around to much. In addition to this I learnt not to remove weights but instead add them. For example if I wanted to decrease a weight on "joint 2" i realised that painting more onto "joint 1" and "joint 3" would remove the weight from "joint 2". This method of "pushing" the weights around a model proved to be a much quicker way of painting weights. When i was happy with how a joint performed locking the joint kept the weights from changing, when using this method I always worked from the root joint outwards as this is the way Maya calculates the weights.

The bird is completed now, all that remains is to experiment with fur a little more in the attempt to get more realistic feathers on the body. The bird will be duplicated and slightly modified so it can be used for the female bird, i'll make the eyes bigger, change the colour of the beak slightly and change the wing colours slightly. The changes are to make the bird look different so the viewer does not get confused and to make the bird look more female. I am undecided as to whether the baby bird will be seen or just heard yet, if it will be seen a similar process will be followed to produce the baby bird. The fur will also be modified to make the baby bird more fluffy.