Battle Arena: Birds

Battle Arena: Birds

After I did the rats I felt the scene could do with some more life in it, so i decided to add birds flying around. This also gave me a chance to try out the rigging I was shown in a 2 hour lesson.

I started off by googling low poly bird models. I found this image below and thought it would be perfect to work from for my bird.

I made this bird by starting with a cude and extruding the faces out and re sizing the edges.

Once I was happy with the shape of the model which only came to 200 tris I started to add rigging to the body and wings of the bird. I connected to wing joint with the end of the wing which allowed them to move fluidly.

I then made a texture in Photoshop for the bird. I wanted it very simple as it would only be used as a silhouette in the sky.

I then started to animate the wings going up and down within Maya. I was shown how to do this in the same lesson as the rigging. 

it was all going perfectly well until I tried exporting the scene/object into Unity. Once I did this the model of the bird was not there. I tried many different ways of importing this model into Unity buy every time I tried it wouldn't be there, only the animation was. After watching countless YouTube videos on the matter i decided to just take the rigging off the bird and try it that way. This for some reason fix the problem. this meant I could animate the bird moving but not have the wings flagging as it flys. If my hand in wasn't so close I would love to finish this and try again, maybe i will do this in the future as i really want to understand how to do this.

Image below is it in the scene. I had them start away from the main part of the arena as I didnt want the camera so show the birds animation start again.