chicken feathers... howto?
 

hi there,

i'm new here and quiet interested in 3d-stuff.
i'm trying to model a simple comic-style chicken, everything looks fine, but i don't get those neat chicken feathers to look like chicken feathers....
is there a possibility to tell maya 4.5 "make feathers" instead of "make hair" (fur)? it's really annoying to draw feathers as they never look homogene and as my graphics card will lie down after a few strokes.

thanks for any help!

Why don´t you try creating a few planes, textured with the feather and a transparency map mapped to the texture defining the borders? Could be an alternative.

wow, thats fast :-)

uhm.. you mean every feather is a plane? i should attach hundreds of planes to my chick?
i knew modelling is a hard job... but is it that hard? :-)

what about physics? i plan to make a short movie with this model... maybe... once... :-)

This might help you out:

http://users.pandora.be/gds/maya/

Check out the toon bird tutorial there. It will show you how to model feathers. If it's not what you need, you can try to paint feathers with paintFX.

Also, i think adls way is a great way to do this... so if you took a plane like he said and put a texture on it like a feather that would be your best bet.. as for covering it with feathers... it shouldnt be incredbily hard.. as once you have a small area done, you can just group it and copy paste hundreds of feathers at a time... still would be a pain in the arse.. but could work ;).

Hmmm...I think the tutorial offers an easier way by extruding edges from the bird's body since everything's already connected.

:), yep.. its a good idea... from there though.. you could easly do adl's approach to those faces... i dont know though.. could suck.

okay, i tested the pandora-solution for my problem. extruding edges is quiet simple, but i don't have a glue how to texture these planes.. i've got a nice chicken feather picture, but how do i add the alpha channel to the black background? i didn't found a way with microsoft photodraw 2000.... umm.. i think i got to find photoshop somewhere :-)
but.. how to texture just one face? if i select the face and texture it, the poly-sphere is also textured.

thanks for your help so far, you guys are cool :-))

okay.. solved the texture problem.... just add a new material to the face :-))

but still... dunno how to alpha.