Crane - Side View

Side view of finished geo for the crane character. Lots of consideration already going into the neck. Comparing it to a more humanistic bipedal rig - it shares some characteristics; however the neck will need to be treated like the spine, the body i want to keep pretty rigid i the x axis, might break it up with one join in the midde just so it has a little flex for when the wings fold back into walking position, but might not be necessary.

The bird skeleton seems to suggest the whole body is one fused unit - come to think of it, i've eaten  my fair share of chicken off the bone - we've all picked around that huge lump of cartiladge that ends up in the bin - It has no play in it. Just the same here, except a bit longer.

I've also included the outliner and channel box in the snapshot, just to demonstrate the geometry is fully reduced to one piece, named up, grouped accordingley, has its transformations frozen and history deleted. Ready for rigging. 

Joint Placement - Side

One of the most important parts of the rigging process and sadly not well documented in video tutorials. This rig will have plenty of joints down the neck for the bird to move and shake and connected by spline ik that will be driven by fk joint chain. I'm not going to include any stretch or squash - this character is supposedly made from paper, paper doesn't stretch. 

Legs are pretty straight forward, only they bend in the opposite direction to ours, so i'll bear that in mind. I.m also going to add a couple of joints down the talons, so the bird can clutch, but for now I think this will suffice - might go back into it later and tart it up.

The front of the neck is quite a large area to control with the neck chain and will pose problems when weight painting, so what i'm considering is adding some sort of rib joints, with an expression connecting them to their neck parents that staggers their rotation a little - might hold its geometry a bit better this way? This will certainly make the weight painting a lot easier (one thing i've learnt from the toxic boy rig).  

Joint Placement - Front

Front view of the bird, looking at it again, I think the top leg joints need positioning slightly further down where the begin to bulge out. I've tried to show the rig sections that will hold the geometry towards the front of the neck. Wing sections will have two major bones that bisect the geometry and allow them to fold. The top view will illustrate this better.

Joint Placement - Top

I've begun with the wings - they're going to be the most difficult to work correctly. Thinking about typical wing behaviour, and what springs to mind is the way they fold back on themselves and tuck on top of the upper body and an actual wingflap. To save a boatload of time for the animator, I'm going to set up these motions via set driven keys, then they can just use the slider in the channel box rather than animating it every time.

Looking at the above image, i've had to slightly adjust the geometry on the wing, by shortening the second half so when it rotates and conceals itself under the first section it doesn't poke out at the end. I've also lengthened the first section so it will cover enough distance down the back. Looking at Crane reference material, this is quite some way.

I originally (and incorrectly) thought both sections of the wing rotated in the Y axis in the same direction. This is incorrect; the arrows point out the correct direction. In order to set this up using joints I used a chain which involved a three way setup. A chain that travels down the length of the wing and the offshoots that will point the feathers in the right direction.

I've tried to pose the wing in a folded position, but it turned out impossible to correctly position both the feathers and arm independantly as they share the same axis.

My proposed solution is to group each feather chain individually, then parent the group down the original arm joint chain. Now the arm will affect the rotations of the group node, leaving the joints themselves with free rotation values, that can be rotated to get the feather stretch.  

NB.

I've also added an extra shoulder joint to achieve the necessary Z axis elevation - if you look at reference material, the wings lift at this point to tuck the second section beneath it and hug the body. Very important!

Outliner

Outliner, showing exactly what i've done. Each individual feather chain is in it own group. These group nodes are then parented down the hierachy - exactly how a normal joint chain would be, only theres a group node inbetween doing the spadework, leaving the actual joints on zero rotation and can be independantly manipulated for fine tweaking. I've set the rotation mode to Gimbal, so it's an absolute doddle to animate!