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.

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

Avian particle feathers take 2

Yes, I did it again.

Who would have thought manually doing the hair guides would look better and render a lot faster. I’m also using linked duplicates for the feathers but not sure how much that’s helping if at all.

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