And this time they're not broken XD
Feather rigging took forever. I probably still haven't done it right and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make controllers for them (good thing I'm not aspiring to be a rigger!) but it will do for now.
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.
This was actually done a week or so ago, I'm currently working on the first layer of coverts.
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!
Update: now with animation!
"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.
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.
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:
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):
