June ProgBlog #1: There was a gap

In that gap was a slightly unexpected new puppy (which I wrote a bit about in the homeschool miscellany and covid (not worth the ridiculously excessive fuss and the frantic stripping of as much freedom as possible in that space of time that was made of it, wouldn’t recommend the headache though). And then there was me figuring it wasn’t worth the blog because there hadn’t been much prog and trying to manage that and consistently failing as other things kept happening (not least of which comp season started).

May ProgBlog #2

I’ve made zero progress on Gundry as there is a checkbox which I think I need to tick in Particle Edit mode to make the bake show up so I can edit it, and it seems to be a guaranteed crash. So looks like at this stage unless the new hair system drops sooner than I’m expecting it, I pretty much have to go the curve guide/soft body route.

Which means trying to figure out why my curve guides refuse to stick to their bone hooks and putting up with hair flapping around in anime locks (which at least won’t be too terrible for this project because it’s kind of semi-anime anyway).

May ProgBlog #1

Decided to try particle feathers following this tutorial on BlenderArtists. Got about this far in

and realised that I will likely need different mapping on each side because of how the particles are distributing.

Tried a cheap and dirty method I’ve used before in a hurry, and it only looked slightly better now than it did then and only because I had slightly better understanding of the settings.

Greet the Sun

Not quite a redo of Shimmering Wings. Next job is to try and work out if the first gen Avians had head feathers or if they developed later on down the track. Taha’ne is the earliest known ancestor of Tsa’run and the original developer/inventor of “The Art” (a branch of kung fu specifically tailored to the Winged who eventually evolved into the Flyers, and which was further developed to accommodate both Base Terrans and Evolved with extra limbs).

Guardian Angel

Here we have Azrael in a rare moment of happiness (no he’s not about to kill someone this time).

Very quick redo of a 2010 silhouette sketch from my sketchbook. It was supposed to be coloured but the coloured version ended up being too dark so I just used the multiply, overlay and dodge brushes from David Revoy’s awesome brush set. The original will never again see the light of day unless you’re a Patreon XD (I don’t use Patreon anymore)

I have wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings!

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.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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:

Contemplating Avian wing sizing...

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):