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Here is a brief explanation of how I got the wings to fold up. For some reason is was difficult to find a clear explanation of how this occurs in nature despite googling 'bird wing anatomy' every which I could think of. This video finally provided the explanation (video shows wing bones from a real dead bird, just a warning if that bothers you):
In brief, the way the Humerus and Radius/Ulna come together...they form a slot or groove so when the wing draws closed, the elbow is forced to follow this groove path and that is how the wing tucks under while closing. Mother Nature is friggin' amazing! Thankfully 3D uses a lot of smoke and mirrors and fakery so we don't have to worry about that level of detail of modeling/simulation
For now this test uses a heirarchy instead of bones. I hope to explore making a better wing rig using bones.
Here is a top view. I only have the Primary (pink) and Secondary (violet) flight feathers for this demo.
I modeled Hand, Elbow/Radius and Humerus 'bones' and each is attached to a Null (er...a sphere, so we can see it clearly).
The Radius has 2 duplicate Nulls/Joints. The 'Radius_Joint' controls the rotation on Z axis and the 'Radius_Wing_Fold_Joint' controls the rotation on the Y axis.
The 'Hand', 'Radius_Joint' and 'Humerus_Joint' all rotate on the Z together, along with each individual Primary and Secondary feathers (P1, P2 etc and S1 S2 etc). The feathers fold up like a fan as the Hand and Radius draw close to the body, while the the 'Radius_Wing_Fold_Joint" rotates on the Y axis. The Secondary flight feathers should end up ontop of the Primary flight feathers when fully closed.
The feathers are arranged in an arc to provide for that (I think my example has a bit of poke thru - can be easily fixed with more care of feather placement). This could easily be tied up into an NLA clip to make things nice and tidy.
Still don't know if this is totally 'correct'. Please let me know if this is wrong/bad advice.
edit: OMG, I just noticed I have the 'leading edge' of the Primary feathers backwards. Lol.
edit#2: Forgot to add screen grab of the heirarchy...
Thank you for the kind words on my Cyclops, Bunyip, Headwax, UB, CBird, and DesertDude.
WIP - Cyclops Textures, the Beginning
Growing a Carrara hair eyebrow got me thinking about how I wanted to do the facial texture (with or without baked in eyebrow). So, I have been playing around with textures. I have some reference pics I bought from 3DSK at that other 3D store. Got them more than ten years ago. I often go for a very flat toonish texture, but I thought I'd go for something different for me this time. I loaded the reference image in my image editor, grabbed the eydropper tool, and set up some base background colors. All experiments thus far. The whole body has a base texture with procedural bump and subsurface scattering. I'm starting to adjust and add detail to the face and eyeball. You can probably see the edge of the face UV map.
The highlights for the eyeball are currently baked in but I will be removing that. I did include a separate cornea mesh in the model, so will experiment with highlight and reflection maps.
Eyebrow is Carrara hair
Just the beginning.
UB, I haven't seen Grimm but your characters are inspirational. I will have to check for streaming status. Excellent render.
DesertDude - wow, just wow. Stezza has sort of an enforced break from birds and you step in with incredible research and modeling. Impressive project. The wings have great detail. Can't wait to see the finish.
Thanks Cbird, DesertDude, and Diomede for the comments on the Wesen render. I figure that many folks here are not familiar with Grimm. Neither was I until a few months ago. The characters I chose to render are not exact, just fanciful representations.
One more update on the Cyclops. Here I've added a balding hairline ("horse shoe"), some eyelashes, and morphs to blink the eye, and to rotate the eye. A Carrara hair tip is related to UV mapping and 3D paint. One can apply hair to a model by selecting the polygons to be covered with hair. Of course, this means that the hair line must follow the edge flow of the model. If the mesh is properly UVMapped, one can use a painted texture map in the density channel of the hair shader to control the placement and thickness of the hair. For the main head hair, I used a density mapp that I painted on the head with the 3D paint tool. For the eye lashes, I selected the polygons on the edge of the eyelids. I also changed the eye color to blue to searate more from the skin color and eliminated the baked in highlights. I created a bulge morph for the cornea but I haven't fiddled with the cornea texture yet.
Grimm series is good
@Diomede that is one creepy dude, I'd be keeping an eye on him - awesome modeling & uv'ing
great Grimming there ... love it
great stuff this
Thanks Diomede and Stezza for the nice comments.
+1
Thanks for the info on UV's, 3D Paint and Hair. I never fully understood the UV option for hair. Cool, something new to try!
Skin texture is already looking good. Will be watching with interest.
hair UV follows the underlying mesh from the root to the tip with the option of two maps one for root one for tip
so if you have a rainbow stripe spectrum map and it is a spherically mapped sphere you would get latitudinal rings one way and longitudinal segments the other rotating it for example, and the swap along the strand if doing one way on root other on tip.
Ah, thank you Wendy. Not sure I fully follow that yet, will have to give it a try and muck around.
UB - excellent Grimm, Reptillian & Sherlock Holmes are my type of critters !!!
DesertDude - Fantabulous, modelling those wings is getting me very interested in doing some modelling of my own !!!
Diomede - your Cyclops just keeps getting betterer all the time !!!
Stezza and Bunyip, thanks for the good words!
Diomede and DesertDude, interesting modeling. Can't wait to see the finished products.
Bunyip, hoping to see your modeling very soon.
Hope that more enter this Challenge as well.
thanks UB Cbird Desert Dude Ted and Stezza for your kindness ... ha ha hope I didnt leave anyone out!! (or put anyone in)
Diomede that monobrow really revvs up the character another step. Interesting how artists normally put the eye in the centre of the forehead (from memory) I like your anatomical positioning.
wow it always impresses me how you can pull something like this off with no postwork - looks like a tv add for the show
@DesertDude talking about anatomical - great lesson thankjs for the explantion - love how you have constructed the wing and the style you use for your artwork.
here's the Tooth Fairy - m1 made his skin transparent so you could see the underlying skeleton - used a bulb to just light the skeleton - littl;e girl in the bed is reused from a Peter Pan render I did a few years ago - (rerendered in a forest though not a bedroom)
it's a 4000 px wide image if you want to click it
attached is the nopost image for comparison
Thank you Bunyip, UnifiedBrain and Headwax for the nice comments. I hope to step it up a notch or two for this challenge since I have a little more spare time these days.
sorry @DesertDude I missed this post
thanks for the comments..
the lighting I used was the lighting to life gels for Carrara but I don't think they are in the store anymore... could be wrong though but I can't find them.
Nice one !!!
Lighting 2 Life Light Gels for Carrara ? - https://www.daz3d.com/lighting-2-life-light-gels-for-carrara
thank goodness we have @bunyip02 ...
Stezza, UB, Wendy, Desertdude, Headwax, and Bunyip, thanks for the comments on my Cyclops.
Cool tip on the root and tip hair shaders, Wendy.
Thanks for the link to the light gel product, Bunyip.
Headwax, that is one spooky Tooth Fairy. All the kids I know would love it!
I'm so loving these critters!
@DesertDude, wow, thank you for showing the wing experiments. They bending and posing options from your set up seem like they will be better than most wings out there. You are tempting me to play with feather creation again :-)
@Diomede, your cyclops seems more real with each step. I thought the hair would make him seem less scary, but it doesn't.
@Headwax, all the textures at play in the Toothfairy image are stunning.
@Wendy, thank you for the hair tip! I had wondered about something like that, but didn't know where to start.
Here is the Weheela, or white wolf. Some believe it is simply a very large white wolf, others a dire wolf, and my pick a prehistoric Amphicyon survival. The Amphicyonids are giant bear dogs, some as big as polar bears. I love the whole idea of megafauna. I've used Dog 8 with Rawart's Bear Dog morph, added some of the Dog 8 morphs, and then Carrara fur. I also had a go at combining moonlight and fire light. I played with adding an orange bulb into the center of the fire. The bulb has glow added in the effects tab. Postwork was playing around in Topaz Impressions.
Great action scene !!
is that a cyclorama that you used?
it really upsets the composition/balance of the great image IMO.. that line ... very weird..
other than that it's Tom Terrific
Thank you, Bunyip.
Stezza, I think you're right. It's actually a terrain with a crater, then one of Dart's textures for the ground. I think I may have created the problem with not having soften the edge on the crater. It's only the moonlight hitting it.
As you travel the roads in Australia you will come across 'road kill'
a sad way to go for our native animals... but did you know that the fox is an introduced species, a wirey smarty type of animal to clever to be knocked over by some random truck or car on a road!
It's easy prey however for the notorius drop bear
if you see a fox carcass on the side of the road don't think it was taken out by a car or truck... no... it was taken out by the DROP BEAR and its remains are left on the side of the road to give you the wrong impression... be carefull .... they sneak!
the Drop Bear
Stezza, I love the fox's classic "what the --" look!
Thank you for the new comments, CBird and Stezza.
CBird, love the color palette of your mega-dog or dog/bear. Very intense.
Stezza, the drop bear is even more sneaky than a fox? And how clever to place the fox carcases by the road to make it look like someone else did it.
Sunburn Cyclops!
Here is my latest shader experiment for the Cyclops. Still focused on experimenting with skin. Here, I started with Black/White procedural shaders and then used the Baker plugin to generate grayscale texture maps for the whole cyclops. Then I took the texture maps and used them in a blender to generate a sample diffuse channel. A reason to bake maps is to edit them. Ultimately, I intend to augment the maps by using the 3D paint tool on the model and in an image editor, but I thought this experiment was worth reporting.
- Map 1 was intended as a base for an eventual highlight channel map and bump map. It is based on a spots procedural combined with marble and cell, but the spots dominate.
- Map 2 was intended as a base to supplement the color channel (diffuse). It is a function of slope (face up toward the sun or down toward the ground).
- In a test of the diffuse effect, I created a blender of a tannish color and a reddish color. For the blend, I added 50% spot map and 50% slope map.
I hope you see some potential in the result.