modelling
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.
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
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):
Avian wing progression
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. My previous texture experiments on double sided planes haven’t yielded the best results unless you can avoid looking at it from too much to the side so I made these ones thicker.
Square toes
I was working on 3d-fyn’s feet when 5yo came in and observed what was on my screen. He stared for a little bit, then leaned on my desk so he could pick up and scrutinise his own cute little foot carefully before pointing out that toes weren’t square, but at least I got one right. I told him that my base model was very square and I was fixing it up as I made my characters, and that’s what I was doing right now.
Blender Adventures Part 2
I finally got basic modelling in Blender. All I needed was to find where the subdivision tool was hidden. Early days Blender and Lightwave comparison: Layout I prefer having a menu on my right as I use a Cintiq and find it quicker to access stuff I don’t know keyboard shortcuts for (or that don’t have keyboard shortcuts) if the menu is over to the right. I can move it in preferences in Lightwave.
Working the torso
So I’m hideously slow on WiP shots. Part of it is because I’m feeling a distinct pointlessness in them (there are many characters and whatnot to come) and most of it is simply because I keep putting off taking the screenshot when I think about it, and then eventually forget. Every now and again though I need to remind myself I’m making progress. Here I’ve hidden the wing membranes so I can see what I’m doing, and left a point highlighted so that the close up pane makes some semblance of sense.
Ear wip
Good enough for now, I’m sure I’ll fiddle with it more as I go. Was going to post a much earlier wip and of course it was “after I fix this, and do this bit, and what the hell is that, and…” now it’s mostly done. I’m not sure if the model in my anatomy book has tiny ears, but if Red’s ears look massive it’s intentional, the Dragonkin inherited large pointy bat-reminiscent ears from the Chiropterans who went extinct a thousand or so years before the timeblock I’m currently working in.
Lightwave3D notes: fixes for base characters + clothes notes
Many face tweaks. The “entire area” vertex may pinch the mesh strangely with that many patches using it as a corner, but will have to see how I go with the face morphs. Also I’m stupid and the “moved outward” applies to the vertex above the one highlighted, I am too lazy to change the diagram. There are also two points on the torso along the obliques and on the top part of the shoulder blade that need looking at on the Flier models, I fixed them at some point on Base.