Feathered wing - how to keep feathers from colliding with eachother? I am a brand new Blender user, but loving it.  I am jumping in with my first project, to build and rig a properly functioning feathered raptor dinosaur.  

I've hit a roadblock trying to rig and animate the feathered wing/arm of the raptor.  Each individual feather is made from a modified cube.  All the feathers are parented to the armature rigged to the arm.  When I pose the arm, the feathers are all moving correctly in relationship to the arm.  However, the feathers intersect each-other in certain positions.  I have turned on rigid-body physics (passive) for the feathers and tried to adjust the collision margin.  Nothing changes however.  What do I need to do to get these feathers responding to collisions with each other?  And how can I make sure they stay in position in relation to the arm while they collide?

I apologize if there is a really simple solution.  I am still learning the vocabulary needed to search for solutions.  

Thank you!
Ari
Unfortunately there is no simple solution to this. Passive rigidbodies don't do anything but collide with the active ones, while staying in place, so they won't help you there. Could try to use hinge joints with a lot of constraints (RB settings, not object constraints), but I doubt that will produce steady results (worth a shot, let me know if that works).
Not even animation nodes will get you very far I'm afraid, because they can't simulate, just animate, so they might be able to move some of the feathers, but they will probably collide with the next ones. 
The only sure-fire solution is to create your animation and then manually adjust the overlapping parts, by either making a bone for each feather and bone-parent (what I would prefer) or animating them as individual objects.