Butterfly-flap

The Rigging of the Butterfly.

I first had to model the wings and the body of the butterflies. We decided to keep the body very simple and just have the wings show they are butterflies. I used a template to outline the wings.

I then needed to rig the butterfly, so i used a deformer to get the curve on the wings across both wings, as i first used two deformers and i couldn't get them to work together, i then gave each wing two joints each so that the wings would move.

I then with the help from Keith and the book of an essential introduction to character rigging, i managed to use Set driven key and create a new attribute called FLAP to allow the butterfly to move, and that way there is only one attribute to animate, so it should work out easier in the long run.

Underneath is a short clip of the butterfly flapping. I think 6-7 frames per flap looks best to use when it comes to animate it flying. I must also remember to make it move up and down.

Problem with moving the whole butterfly together would mean that the wings would come apart, managed to fix this by going in the hyper graph editor and moving the polygons out of the parent.