“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.

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.

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.

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 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 ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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:

I can’t remember how I came about my original calculations but I worked out that a 1.8m tall (because that’s how tall my base model is, no other real reason) Avian should have a 10-12m wingspan. Because I didn’t want to make the wing arms too big (because heavy plus looked stupid past a certain point) I managed to end up with 3m long primaries. For comparative purposes one with a 7m wingspan (made the wing arms longer but used the feathers I’d done originally, didn’t zoom in for size comparison):

Reasonably weight mapped chicken wings. Which I think looks a lot better than the Lightwave model I did five years ago (weight mapping was probably still a work in progress here or at least I hope it was, I can’t remember now):

Error riddled but I’m calling it done so I can move along with other things. Like characters and sets and maybe more paintovers. Least my arm rig works which was the purpose of the exercise! This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Amazing what turning on the other two lights can do. Base is a bit less annoyed now that we’ve nearly finished a rig test (FINALLY). This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License