Maya Wing Rigging Tutorial Using nCloth Simulation

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.

[@Takumy_]

And finally. After seven months of useless attempts to make an working rig to the membranes of the wings of my dragons, or at least to find a tutorial, I found you. Live forever in endless happiness and creativity.

[@RandomAwesomeDude]

10 Years later and this tutorial still helps people like me who need to get nCloth done properly. Thank you for this info. 3:53 Couldn't help but laugh when your dog barked when you were talking, so you started talking louder. Do it to my dogs too XD

[@wwg5079]

I cannot tell you how much this tutorial helped. You Sir, are an example of why I love the digital arts community so much.

[@vexorum]

This, sir, is exactly what I was looking for. I can't wait to get to my desk and try it! Thank you very much.

[@BagelBenner]

This is a fantastic tutorial. I consider myself a beginner at character modeling, and the pace you teach your tutorial is much appreciated! I can't tell you how helpful this is! Thanks again for the great tutorial.

[@guldenmw]

you, my friend, are awesome. simple and effective. thank you for taking the time to make this tutorial :) shockingly still the only one im managing to find

[@trevital1422]

So ridiculously helpful I cannot thank you enough for this 15 minutes of insight. Great work

[@kickpunched]

Incredible tutorial and EXACTLY what I was looking for. Thanks for sharing!

[@jasonwillis4718]

I did this and it works beautifully! At first, I thought that I would have to create the wing separately from the rest of the skinned rig, which I didn't want to do. After a while, I realized that I had to use the entire skinned mesh of the rig, including the "wing bones", head, claws, etc., and without the membranes, as the proxy. Then I wrapped a copy of that entire mesh, modeled with the membranes, around the "grouped proxy and nCloth". Now the only problem is having to run the simulation before the first frame of the scene to get the nCloth to settle into position for the initial pose.

[@SpaceKingDinosaur]

You were right about it being fiddly, but WOW it works so well. Thank you very much for presenting this!

[@abigaildebusk4905]

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.

[@RDDsnipez]

you have just saved my final project for uni thank you

[@Dauglashalfve]

Great video, amazing tutorial. I can't see a single thing you missed out on explaining, seem much easier than I thought it would be. Syced to try this out for myself :D

[@fnasserebar]

Thank you so much! Your explanations made me figure out a solution of how you do this in 3ds max

[@Climberfx]

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!

[@michaelllrobson]

Very nice and informative, love it! Thanks Alex

[@OmegaAnimationStudio]

Thank you!!!! I have been trying to figure this out for some time now.

[@0SpaceCadet0]

Your the best brother!!! thanks for going into detail.

[@mulalalu]

Ecellent tutorial, the dogs the cherry on top.

[@benttoenail]

beautiful tutorial, lots of applications for this. Thanks!

[@GameDevAraz]

Finally, A Tutorial That Teaches

[@AlexPTwigg]

I only added simulation to a single layer of the wing as it makes the simulation quicker and easier to manage. If you simulate both layers then you can have issues with the layers interacting with each other and passing through each other, which can take ages to sort. However, if you want to use advanced materials, like Sub-Surface-Scattering, you need to have both layers of the wing in place.

[@Dauglashalfve]

Thank you for the respons, not what I was looking for but nice to get an answare. I'm gonna try to explain it in a way that's more understandable. In the video he duplicated the wing and detatched the membrane so he would be able to convert only that part to nCloth, the joints are then connected to the wing bones of the duplicated wing and the rendered mesh is just following the simmulation by using "wrap". Continuing on another comment >

[@MegaRazac]

thank you so much Alex great tuto

[@antonintripes1437]

Great job, thank you for sharing!

[@ULISESVFX]

WOW, VERY USEFUL TUTORIAL, THANKS

[@raytirat]

Great tutorial. Thank you much!)

[@pankecitu]

excelent tutorial this's what i was looking for :3

[@rawcam16mm57]

i love this video !

[@Slevin3D]

Thank you so much for this tutorial !

[@animationenema]

very good tutorial

[@vijaykumar_mc]

great tutorial. Very useful

[@sk9101]

hey thanks for the tutorial. another way to do this without the component to component constrain is to apply the cloth simulation to the actual rigged wing, and paint the input attract mesh map (white to where the cloth shuld follow the rig exactly - ie the joints, and black where there shuld be a cloth simulation). then you can increase the input mesh attract in the nCloth menu to 1.as you said, applying the nCloth to double sided polygon would be a hassle so you could use the wrapping method.

[@sunahringo7721]

thank you, good tutorial!

[@TheRedThrushHD]

Thank you ;) My next big project is going to be a dragon, so it's really helpful :P

[@FOTOGRAMA30]

excelent tutorial thanks!! excelente tutorial gracias!!

[@frelsarenis2246]

Thank you thank you!

[@Anymuster]

Thank you mate. Nice tutorial. and your dog either )))

[@BroMw24]

u are a life saver!

[@avtpro]

Thank you much.

[@timourplekhoff4368]

Awesome.

[@Littlepaw01]

Thank you for sharing!!!

[@12345678954819]

Thank you!

[@offlinebot5453]

really nice tutorial! is that the same technic that is also used for bodys, (like elephants or dinosaur for example)

[@2012AndyGee]

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 !

[@RH3D]

you sound SO MUCH LIKE NICK GRIMSHAW!!! (also, thanks so much for this)

[@samirahmedyahia]

Great ! Thank you !

[@Roycalimir]

Great tutorial! Thanks for addressing the small little things that instructors usually fail to mention because they feel it's trivial. If I may ask one question...you nCloth'd only the top layer of your double-sided wing, and then stitched it back to a single edge on the mesh. Does that mean there's still a hole underneath? Is the bottom layer completely useless then, or should it be done with the bottom also and stitched again? Thanks!

[@jolinarcze]

hey man, interesting tutorial! though I still think there must be a more light-weight option on how to integrate these two systems, since adding a wrap to a whole fully rigged good-quality character, that would have anywhere around 30k polys, is a stretch.. i guess puppet rig comes to place then, but even so.. off the top of my head, im thinking about a switch to turn on/off the wrap, or a on/off for the cloth and painting maps for the cloth sim for input attract.. just to keep things breezing..

[@WOLF-dt3wb]

thanks a lot mate

[@ruudygh]

Hi this is really helpful. but im wondering is the weld adjacent border do the same thing like component to component constraint?

[@TommieBommie]

awsome thanks!

[@Harriloven]

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 :)

[@12Konst]

Exactly what I was looking for.....(Y)

[@mattfx86]

Thanks : )

[@PaszerDye]

PPS. Maybe point out at which stage of the process or workflow you execute this method...

[@Dauglashalfve]

Now after i've been fiddeling about with this I just got a few questions. If you would do this for a whole solid mesh, like a bat or a dragon. Would you rig a duplicated version of the whole mesh (including body, head etc) with the wing tissue being nCloth and then warp the whole thing over to the smoothed version or would you go about it in some different way? Also, do you think what I'm explaining would result in unnecessery use of processing power?

[@mrirurfkjsdo]

helpful !! thk's !!

[@Dauglashalfve]

I'm in a very simple way put, interested how the the rig with this function would look on a whole bat, not only the bat wing, doesn't matter though, I'll probably figure something out :]

[@Dauglashalfve]

If I or someone else would do this but on a whole bat that's a solid mesh, not only the wing. Would I duplicate the whole mesh of that bat, do the same thing as he did with the wing and also rig that whole duplicated bat so it's able to move its head, legs etc and then use "wrap" to make it so that the "render version" of the bat is following the duplicated, fully rigged one? Hope this is easier to understand :)

[@Tsonchi]

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

[@helios4753]

Hellloooooo Batman cape.

[@Godzillakuj94]

So did you rig the wing before or after separating the membrane from the wing? I have to do a dragon wing for a project and I'm currently having some problems.

[@Mrk3nt0n_art]

regards, I speak to you from Costa Rica, I would like to ask you a question, as is possible, to accommodate the rig, once you finish these steps. since I'm doing an animation, and I want to transfer rotate and scale the character, but everything together with the ncloth, without damaging the structure. I wait fast answer.

[@taufiqsuraman9562]

ok i have a tissue model and rigged how do i apply the ncloth... when i apply it, it just drop like that

[@ashleighnicole5933]

Will it work if I animate the joints before I add the constraints?

[@foist101]

Neat

[@mynameisjohnj]

Hi Alex, great tutorial, but I'm getting a bug that occurs when I animate the joints. The constraint applies fine, but when the joint is moved the cloth seems to "hang up" at its initial position; see an image here: Is this something you've encountered before?

[@leonthomas7185]

This may sound like a silly question, but does it have to be rigged before you do this or can you do the nCloth and wrap first and do the rigging and animation later?

[@alejandragz3368]

Hi!! It works great but I got a problem, I want to integrate this wings into my animation but I cannot mannage the Cloth meshes to follow my bones correctly when I rotate the hole rig, I mean. I rigged like this, then I want to posisionate my rig from the main ctrl and move it somewhere else and the finger mesh do follow my Joints buuutt the ncloth meshes stay in this rotation and just seem like hanging when I play the simulation

[@alejandragz3368]

I try to put the meshes under de figer mesh in the Jerachy of the outliner but not working, also I try to put the hole group of cloth and fingers in my rig chain and it does rotatate but not absolutly right, kind of out of phase

[@Ccs1989]

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.

[@PaszerDye]

PS. For now, I'll see how far I can go with just extracting the membrane from the main model, and constraining it to the wing shape.

[@giaMalik]

I have implemented this method but when animating it the whole dragon starts deforming... and I only need the wings to defrom... What am I doing wrong?

[@MsKandahar]

Hi is this possible with crow wings?

[@mynameisjohnj]

Sorry, the link is image shack dot us then / g / 4 0 7 / then wingbend , png Sorry about the messed up url...youtube...

[@vijaykumar_mc]

Hey Alex, I made a tutorial myself that needed to handle nCloth, Blendshapes and joints. I have linked this tutorial in the description of that video. Hope that is alright. You can find the tutorial here: vimeo.com/mcvijay/geometrycache

[@mrpixxx]

omg he so does hahaha

[@NinjaFlibble]

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)

[@lgtwzrd]

13:34 Just wanted to point out how important it is to do this step EXACTLY this way, or you will be in a whole world of pain, spending hours not understanding why the simulation is falling apart.

[@Snakebloke]

the membrane would need to be taut otherwise the aerodynamics wouldn't work...

[@Ccs1989]

Bat wings are actually pretty flappy in the membranes. Watch some slow motion videos of bats.

[@Snakebloke]

Ccs1989 Yeah I have since then so I feel like a proper twonk now! :P

[@PaszerDye]

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