A nice and long article about special effects in Good Omens! :) A lot of info, such as:
Can you explain in detail about the design and the creation of the Wings?
Crowley and Aziraphale both have large wings when seen in their real forms. Initially, our concept artist Grant Bonser designed bat-style wings for Crowley but Neil Gaiman preferred to have feathers for both the demons and angels.
We built each feather based on swan wings – which was most appropriate to the concept. We started building the feathers in geometry so that we had a map for our groom team to develop each feather. The wings were laid out in an anatomically correct way, with primary feathers (the long finger like feathers that feature at ends of wings); secondaries (above those on the ends of the wings) and coverts (top wings / fluffier wings). The wings were then re-groomed into feathers using Yeti. We modelled in a swan’s wing bone structure and this was then all passed to the rigging team to ensure the feathers folded correctly and worked well together. Working together, the groom, modelling and rigging and animation teams refined the wings, referencing heavily the way a swan’s wing physically folds and behaves to ensure that when doing our wing simulations, everything behaved realistically.
We decided to create the wing texturing in the look development phase. It was all shader based so that we could have complete control over colour variants and no one feather was the same hue, to break up the overall look making it more realistic.
Getting the right balance of iridescence on the black feathers and then ensuring the white feathers had enough detail and variation to stand out was challenging. We spent time in the look development stages tweaking the shaders and then when we got to actual shot production we were working very closely with Neil and our groom and creature effects team so that we were able to get a look that he and Douglas were really happy with.
Some of the shots needed to have a bespoke groom set up as we soon realised that when the animators were posing the wings at some angles they would not capture the correct shape or volume that was required for that specific shot, but this gave us the freedom to sculpt the groom and make sure that none of the detail was lost and so the wings looked and felt a part of the actors as they progressed thought the scene.
This is all very lovely but I’m stuck on the fact that they are actually swan wings. Where’s that post that says these wings are made for hitting and that’s just what they’ll do?
wait they’re based off swan wings????
where’s that post that talks about the white swan and the black swan meeting on the pond just as Aziraphale & Crowley meet in the Victorian era????
@kedreeva have you seen this?
Bahaha I haven’t but swans were my guess so it’s gratifying to see I was correct. Also, fuckin good. The way they USED their wings was like swans too, for example here’s the time to fight pose:
Look familiar? It should:
I’ll be honest their wings were very good, my only complaint would be the actual width of the feathers (primaries and secondaries) needed to be wider, to leave fewer gaps between them (gaps aren’t good for flight after all), for example here:
You can see, even when raised up to fight or spread in flight, the feathers overlap to form a solid structure around which air can flow to provide lift.
Either way though, the wings were lovely and I enjoyed them immensely. They’re right about them moving realistically AND like a swan’s wings. The way they fold up screams swan, it’s a really unique fold that gives them that ‘boat’ appearance on water and gives you those great photos of mama swans with their babies on their backs. They are GREAT wings and I’m really glad they went with swan over, for instance, any bird of prey like you normally see.
I’m not sure if you’re into Good Omens, @elodieunderglass , but the swan wings thing feels right in your wheelhouse
The swan wing pose where they half-raise their wings to display is called “busking” and is unique to the family
ace-attorney-dms
