Feathers... ideas?
Oso3D
Posts: 14,907
in The Commons
So I'd like to make a 'feathered serpent' but... um... huh.
One possibility is texturing. I have a scale texture that -might- work if I stretch it. Confidence is... low.
Another option is LAMH, but I've never managed to get instanced geometry to work without my machine locking up.
Finally, some sort of conforming outfit might work, but I imagine autofit would likely distort it horribly.
ideas?
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I think you can search for some fractal generating programs and generate good feathers with them. They usually have a lot of presets & there are a few free fractal programs too. Or treat them like blades of grass and just replace the textures that go with them.
There is an old model "Quexi" that came over from RDNA. Probably not enought feathers for what you want. It's still in the store.
https://www.daz3d.com/quexi-mythical-feathered-serpent
I actually have that, was hoping to create something to use on the 'serpentine dragon' morph I've been working on
Conforming outfit is probably your best bet IMO. If its intended particulary for a specific morph, what might work is to model it on that morph a la this tutorial.
I have him too. I can try to make new textures for him but not iRay but 3Delight. First I have to download him. He looks cool but could have done updates.
I briefly tried this idea and had some success by finding a product (I think it was a V3/M3 headdress) with feathers and extracting a single feather, recoloring it, then using it as a brush to just brute force stamp all over the eastern dragon with some variations in size and color, starting at the back and working forward so the feathers overlapped correctly. While labor-intensive it worked great for a distance render, I only abanadoned the idea because I decided I wanted to use a legless snake instead and didn't have time to redo the entire effort.
Can't afford zbrush, alas, but if that ever changes I'll look into it. :)
There are some feather shaped brushes at rendo if you need to render a stray feather or two
I might try to paint/stamp it, but I'd really rather not have to. Heh
I'm not sure how it works, but I remember Kendal/Kendall saying you could use the instance function of LAMH to create feathers. (I just don't know how you create the feathers :p)
Yeah, I've experimented with that in LAMH before, and it invariably locks up my computer. Bah
I'm experimenting with scale textures, cautiously optimistic.
Have you used up your 45 free days yet? https://pixologic.com/zbrush/trial/
I almost don't want to, because I'll cry when I have to close the door on a $700 program. ;)
feathers for anything would be good but they may be coming in the next lamh remember they were talking about doing a new version well the reason I'm speculating that may allow us the ability to create feathers is because of the new raptor Deinonychus Anirrhopus has been working on looks really cool both feathered and unfeathered version of course the feathers may still have been done in zbrush so I'm just speculating about lamh2 and that it would offer this but still be cool if it does and was on it's way, other than that guess only way is via zbrush or its like or via post probably a few feather brushes out there for photoshop and paintshop pro there are hair and fur ones
just did a search and found some free photoshop feather brushes https://www.brusheezy.com/brushes/35714-feather-brushes
Stretching the scales seems to be doing the trick, just have to touch it up and find shader settings I'm happy with.
Oh you should be much more than cautiously optimistic. Your scale textures are gorgeous!
Some unrelated thoughts:
If I were trying this I would try to strip the feathers out of the Quexi Model and use multiple copies of the feathers.
Whenever I insall something that is basically a texture & Trans for a flat plane, I collect the textures in one place so I have a large collection of leaves, flower petals. maple spinners, feathers etc that I can apply to various projects.
Redfern did an interesting hair project using a posable tail from rendo.
I'm getting pretty good results, but I think I'm going to have to do it in 3dl unless I ever get access to HD morphs, because the figure has to hit SubD4+ before they look right in Iray.
I sent a pm to you that you might be interested in I think
So I switched to 3dl because Iray might do a lot of things great, but displacement ain't one of 'em.
Pretty happy with this result!
well in carrara one would simply surface replicate the feathers probably transmapped planes
so maybe create real instances and export that then use the transfer utility near vertices setting to fit the results
I'm totally spit-balling here, but for what it's worth ...
What comes to mind is creating a relatively small number of "feather-shaped" objects -- one for each of several "generic" feather sizes/shapes -- which probably will be pretty thin, with a "fan" off of each side of a cylinder-ish quill running down the middle lengthwise. These could potentially be "traced" from photo images of real feathers.
You could then modify or create-from-scratch separate texture maps for the diffuse, bump, displacement, glossiness, etc. information required for the Material for each
"type" of feather.
After placing (by instancing or otherwise) a feather of an appropriate size/shape "type" until your Feathered Dragon's is covered (whether as a "skin" or as conforming "clothing" that covers any base surface on the geometry) ... you could then assign the right feather Material to each placed feather and "paint" those out on a UV Map template of the dragon's feathered body sections.
Might work ... or not?
See attached files for (an old/weak) example of feathers images laid out for a UV Map. The resulting texture set supported a 36-feather trim on a Native American war shield.