Anyone made an animated bird with feathers?
 

Hi all,

I have to make three birds which are to be fully animated. The geometry is NURBS and I'm planning to use a wrap to animate it. I want to cover it with feathers. I've tried PaintEffects feathers, but they seem rather uncontrolled, and the rendering is slowed down quite a lot. What I want to do is make up individual feathers (just one NURBS patch each) and fix them to the body surface in such a way that they will move with it as it deformes, but not be deformed themselves (so including them in the wrap doesn't work). I've tried using surface and normal constraints, but the feathers move across the surface as it deforms. So far, point constraints just fix the feathers at the body's origin.

Anyone got any ideas - or a better way of doing this?

Check out this tutorial. It's not about a tutorials on feathers, it on making a bird, but the guy makes the feathers [rather simply, i must say]

http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials...orial/bird.asp

Hope this helps :)

...as far as I know this bird is made using polys....

yes , his geometry for the feathers is polys, but I be he maps feather textures on the polys he has extruded from the body.

Thanks guys, from you conversation that looks interesting. Trouble is, I can't get the link to work (throws up an error), and I can't find the tutorial anywhere on the site. Is it possible they've pulled it since you saw it?



And on a different tack: Axel, how's Maya's working speed on a Mac? I'm a Mac man, but I've got a PC for Maya at the moment. Not sure whether Mac graphics cards are up to the mark yet...

AAAH! I just clicked on your link instead of copying and pasting it into the address window, and it took me straight there! Forget the last post - except for the Mac bit...