Avian particle feathers take 2

Yes, I did it again.

Who would have thought manually doing the hair guides would look better and render a lot faster. I’m also using linked duplicates for the feathers but not sure how much that’s helping if at all.

The hang of it

Eventually got the hang of the Rigify-Pitchipoy rig that ships with Blender. I’ll use this one instead of mine XD

(I made mine with the intention to use it for animating but it was mostly to learn how to rig in Blender because I like having an idea of how to do everything, I am however not a rigger)

Please excuse the odd deformations, it’s a low poly model and I didn’t fix up the (pretty good) autoskinning as the intention was to test the rig. These folded arms are much better than my last folded arms and much easier!

Sigh

How I feel about a number of things at the moment, including finally working out how to usea couple of the controllers that were puzzling me..

Part of the rig test I’m currently doing. Now that I’ve worked out how it works (setup is a bit of a chore especially the umpteenth time) Rigify-Pitchipoy is awesome XD I have zero regrets fighting with the rig I had before as I did want to learn how to rig (and now know how to do a basic one) but can’t say I’m good at it. Will definitely be using this one for characters. Can really get stuck into characters and sets now I think as the rig was the last major blocker.

AER: Club Can't Handle Me

“You know I know how to make ’em stop and stare as I zone out, the club can’t even handle me right now…watchin’ you watchin’ me I go all out, the club can’t even handle me right now!”

The original idea was to the song “I Like the Way” by Bodyrockers and was going to be done in silhouette possibly with flashy background like some of the old iPod ads or the art that could be found on iTunes cards, which developed from thinking I should do a series like that of Megan dancing.

Zara and Starzone

My two characters most likely to get caught up in a rooftop firefight. A redo of the last piece I did three years ago which I wasn’t that thrilled with when I finished it.

Starzone is closer to her original design this time round mostly to show character evolution. I was under 17 when I came up with the Biker Mice fan characters so I really can’t remember what I was thinking when I decided she could normally wear clubbing gear or have those odd blades of hers. In roleplays she is usually dressed more like Zara because it’s more sensible.

It's all about the camera angle

The poses are exactly the same, just the camera angles are different, and it changes the entire feel of the piece.

I couldn’t decide between the screencaps initially so I polled it. Quadrapop, Chappie and 8yo voted for the first one, Sprat voted the second one and did a massive artistic crit in capital letters when she found out she’d been outvoted. I then lined the second one (I don’t call it inking unless the lines will actually stay on the piece), and because I draw pretty quick when I’m drawing over something I then drew over the second one for the hell of it. Gives me a bit more to think about when choosing camera angles anyway.

Particle wing progression

Every now and again I need to do a test render to show myself some progress, because laying out feathers is very tedious. Right wing only has flight feathers, left wing has two layers of underside coverts (the second layer is incomplete) and I’ll figure out how to do the downy feathers later. In the interests of speed I set it to render only one child per strand, this one took about 15mins. 5 children per strand looks better, when I have the time and the inclination I’ll compare it to 20 (which was what I was using originally before there were too many feathers) and see if the extra children is worth the jump in render time.

Particle feathers

Particle feathers look a hell of a lot better than polygon feathers but take about a million years to render. This frame took 50mins. This would be why people use polygon feathers with texture maps.

…at this stage I may bite the excessive render times for the nicer appearance.

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Can't fudge this

The good thing about drawing is that you can blithely say that your character has a 20m wingspan and still draw them folded up neatly against their backs in the pose everyone expects, which is something similar to my short-armed redo which had a roughly 5m wingspan:

Unfortunately it doesn’t work as well in 3d! After getting the opinions of family and friends I settled on the 7m wingspan. Quadrapop wondered how to keep the feathers off the ground, I incorrectly said I’d investigated and the 5m and 7m wingspans cleared the ground. the 5m ones did easily due to the shortness of the arms. the 7m ones use the same length feathers as the 5m ones but the arms are longer, and I initially folded the feathers down wrongly in my initial super quick test. So when I actually did the proper furling morphs I ran into a slight problem: