Starting work on my entry for The Great Pokemon Sky Race Collaboration.  I need to do another version of 3d-fyn (because the last one blew up while I was fiddling with something, probably the rig, and then I reworked Base's rig anyway) as well.  3d-fyn will be riding Flashwing (pidgeot from my Pokemon Yellow game) in mega-evolution (I think mega evolutions are kinda dumb really, however mega-pidgeot form is theoretically big enough to carry 3d-fyn otherwise we'd need an enormous pidgeot).

Build list

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.

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!

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 pose kind of just happened shortly after I animated a "yeah...and...?" type shrug, and it reminded me of all the similar types of poses I've seen in movies and various pieces of art around the place, usually where the hero has been beaten to a pulp and is staggering off somewhere or stubbornly staggers back to their feet to eventually kick arse and chew bubble gum.

In other news, the arm rigs seem to work now.

Base pretending it's not recovering from a stumble.

 I stuffed up the initial walk timing and with the amount of keying I'd done it was easier to just remove them and try again.  It's getting there.

Screencap of the latest rig test.  Base has had enough :)