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
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.
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):
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):
And now comes with primary, secondary and tertial flight feathers.
QAD render to celebrate finishing the bulk of rigging. A couple of tiny little tweaks to make but it's stuff I can do as I go.
Low enhanced antialiasing, radiosity and Skytracer on default settings (added the thing, checked the cloud boxes).
Think I used too much blue. And yes it looks funny as there are no
joint or face morphs. I need more RAM and less OpenGL sliders.
The pose is based off a really old pic of my sister's as I realised a bit ago that my base models matched up with her fan characters.
Weight mapping and adjusting geometry on wings. Still a way to go, obviously.
