Those feathers look awsome!

Thougt I'd texture him first. Still haven't figured out an easy way to do the feathers... maybe he don't need them ;)

http://kbrown.wolfenstein.org/temp/falconWip8.jpg

Wow! Great job!

Coming along nicely. Go go go kb.

really a nice job

Awesome! Looks like a photo.

STOP POSTING PHOTOS!!!!

Please excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor and shove my eyeballs back into their sockets...

W0wah!

KB

This is a great model, do the feathers on the wings and finish it. Use a map with transparency if you have to. PFX can be a real pain but thats another altenative. or you could be really sick and model the feathers idividually!!!


_J

Thanks guys. I've been trying lots of different techniques to do the feathers but none of them has pleased me so far...

Fur looks... well fur ;) Paint effects gives nice results but is more like pain effects to control. Maybe maps with transparency is the way to go even if it requires a lot of work... let's see...

Four individual polygon planes with feather textures... maybe this is the way -> gonna be helluva job to do the variations and place them on the bird...

http://kbrown.wolfenstein.org/temp/polyFeather2.jpg

Went to a sports shop and bought few real feathers they use in fly-fishing. Scanned them and made the two images below in photoshop.

http://kbrown.wolfenstein.org/temp/featherSet.jpg

http://kbrown.wolfenstein.org/temp/featherSet2.jpg

I also did some R&D on how to attach the feathers on the bird while having them to stick on the surface while it deforms. The following two playblast clips shows my results so far (both about 1mb).

http://kbrown.wolfenstein.org/temp/blast3.avi - About 1200 poly planes attached to a poly sphere which has a twist deformer.

http://kbrown.wolfenstein.org/temp/blast5.avi - 540 poly planes attached to a poly cylinder which has a bend deformer.

My method seems to work but it's pretty slow to evaluate :(

the poly plane thing I think is essentially how we did the hippogriff here at work (I didn't work on it so I'm not 100% on it) but I know it used a LOT of planes with textures on :)

But it is looking great! I would definatley say you should pursue the feathers idea because if you're going for closeups you're going to need them :)

I really like the first try at feathers you did on the first page.

i dont see any images