Bird wing improvement and blends

This is a play blast of the birds blend shaped wings:



The images are to show my developments of my bird:

For Sal's project I was given the task to model and animate a bird/bee/butterfly. The hardest to model was the bird because of the wings. I designed a quick bird model and begun to design the wings but they did not look like birds wings nor did it make it easier to design them to fly so I took the old wings and changed them for a layered design, where I can bend the wings and it has been build for an easier texture because its a flat plane.

I have done a few tests of the wings opening and closing using blend shapes and also to see how it could fly. So far I think that it is a good step in the right direction, I believe that the wings look better but they are also easier to work with so I was able to make it fly though blend shapes, I have also taken some screen shots to have a look at my developments and a short play blast.

The image below was the first idea for the wings. The idea was to make the wings look like they had feathers coming directly out of the bone of the wing. From above it looks like a good idea but from the side/front/back they did not look right for the structure of the bird model and would have been a problem when trying to open and close the wings. The images above are the new wings I have been working on.