*** For Blender 2.8 Only!***

This rig is a custom rig of my own creation in the style of full body IK for ease of posing and animation. Fully setup with custom bone shapes and color coded bone groups for ease of selection. No addons were used and it was created with Blender 2.8 & ZBrush and also tailored more specifically for Eevee but it also works with Cycles. 

It is a very versatile rig in the sense that you can easily change the look of the crow by simply changing a few features. The common crow/raven size is roughly 1 to 1.5 meter wingspan which I reflected in this file at 1.2 blender units.

This file should technically be completely real-time since its only 30k polys at the lowest subdivisions including the body feathers. But it isn’t unless you turn off the particle feathers for the body and head. I believe that in time as Blender 2.8 progress, it will become real-time. Right now it is the instancing of the object with the hair particles that isn’t yet on point I believe. But it still renders very fast with eevee, not really fast to render with cycles as expected.

How to work with the file:

1. You simply open the RealisticStylizedCrowRigged.blend and save to a different .blend name and work in there so you don’t mess up the original file.

1. You can also simply link the main crow collection and proxy the armature and start animating.

1. You can also append the crow collection to your own scene, edit the features to your liking and start animating.

1. If you would like to use multiple crows you can simply open the main file, perform the edits you need like change eyes color and the physical feature changes you need and rename the main collection name to the one of that character you want. You should also rename the armature because blender doesn’t like multiple armature/collection with the exact same name. And save to a different .blend name. You can then append or link that file the same as you would with other character files.

*Note: You cannot duplicate the collections and rename the features it just doesn’t work. The data gets linked together and it cannot really be unlinked within that file. So best to link or append with pre made changes and saved to different files you can use as characters.

Scaling the rig:

1. If your scene is not to the blender unit = 1 meter scale, you can scale this rig considerably, but not through the root armature, but rather the object scale. 

2. If you only need a tad smaller or bigger, you can scale the armature global root. Keep in mind the smaller you scale or bigger will affect the particle feathers length.

The rig controls:

1. There is two root controls, the global root and the local root. The global root moves and scale the entire rig from its base, the local root is more for flight and is in the middle of the body.

2. The body control bone only controls the body part leaving the feet on the ground, perfect to animate on the ground or perched on a branch.

3. The head control bone can be scaled, moved and rotated, also have a nPanel property called neckStretchOnOff to either stretch the neck or use the head as full body IK.

4. The upper back control bone controls the full body IK if the head control is set to stretch, can also rotate to more the head. It also has two properties, feather puff that fluff the neck and torso feathers and wind which turns on fake wind for the body feathers.

5. The hips controls the hips movement, rotation and scale of the hips and tail. 

6. The tail control the spread of the tail feathers as well as the up and down curl. The tailWind controls the fake wind independently.

7. The thigh and foot controls the rotation of the overall leg as well as scale the leg and feet/talons.

8. The foot IK controls the foot placement, rotation and scale of the foot.

9. The toes controls all the toes with location, rotation and scale. Each toes can also be individually controlled as well with the corresponding target.

10. The clavicle bones controls part of the overall wing rotation as well as the scale of the wing.

11. The wing control the rotation and the y scale controls partially the closing of the wing.

12. The wrist controls the tip of the wing rotation and closing.

13. The secondaries and primaries target controls the spacing of the feathers as well as the rotation and the fake wind using the y scale (scale in, not out).

14. The wing cube automates the wings folding and rotation of the entire clavicle and wing as well as controlling the wrist.

15. The jaw controls the jaw and the tongue also follows with a slight rotation to automate it although independently pose-able. (can also be moved if you unlock location to make him talk or give a sense of facial expressions)

16. The eye bone controls the rotation of the eye independent from one another since bird can see both in front with both eyes or each side individually with each eyes. There is two nPanel properties to close the main lids for sleeping and to control the Iris scale. The membrane bone close the 3rd lid which is the nictitating membranes that acts as the wiper of the eyes.

17. The thorax bone allows you to scale, flatten, move up down, or even animate breathing chest.

And that covers pretty much the entire rig, it is the same on both side. I hope you enjoy this rig. It truly is easy to pose and animate. This flying animation was done in less than 30 minutes, fake wind is awesome! No simulation time :)

Changing the look and color:

1. Expand the timeline panel and switch it to a Shader Editer.

2. Select either the covert or down feather object in the Outliner (they share the same material) and edit the material bottom color of the color mix node to change the color of the entire body feathers.

3. Select the flight feathers object in the Outliner and edit the material bottom color of the color mix node to change the color of the entire set of flight feathers (wings & tail).

4. You can add a gradient to the flight feathers by adding a procedural texture, a ramp & a vector mapping and plug that in the color mix bottom color slot and edit the mapping node, setting it to texture and rotate Z of 90 degree. From there edit the ramp colors and value sliders.

5. You can alternatively use any of the other procedural nodes to get many different details or combine them together for very complex patterns.

6. To edit the skin color, you need to expand the armature in the Outliner and select the skin to edit the material. To change the color, you can simply add a color mix node here and change the bottom color.

And that pretty much covers how to change the feather and body colors.

Additional information:

If you'd like more complex body feather patterns of different colors, you'll need to edit and create particle systems for each ones as well as duplicate the little feathers (down & covert) and duplicate its materials to assign to those newly created particle systems. You can also edit the shape of the beak to your liking. A lot of different birds are completely doable from this one as long as they have similar features like the type of feet and relatively similar size. Since the neck is stretchable it also means you can create long neck bird with it fairly easily (simply control the neck movement using the upper back control instead of the head control so you don't accidentally change the neck length). 

If you have any questions or issues with my crow rig, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me through the contact creator link on BM.  I will answer as fast as I possibly can.