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).

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. This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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):

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. He wished me luck fixing it up and trotted on his merry way. Cutely.

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.

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. Done some work on the arms but not a lot, none on the legs, focusing on the torso and pretty much making up the anatomy where the wings are attached as I go.

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.

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.