FYPMC

I haven't updated in a while as I have been struggling with two main things, feathers and wings!

The wing is the main thing I have had issues with, there was the option to have two models; one with wings opening and fully functional and one just with wings closed. I feel I have got to a certain point where I'm to close to go back now. The actual modelling of the magpie on the plus was a breeze.

Feather samples:

The feather on the left is a sculpted polygon feather with actual depth and extrusions, the feather on the right is a .PNG file with transparency added to a plane. There is little difference between the two visually, but i am thinking of adding nCloth to the feathers at a later date and the sculpted feather on the left will perform better as it has more geometry.

All feathers (sculpted & planes):

I have managed to find a website that actually documents the feathers of birds and have been able to photoshop the images so they have alpha backgrounds and improved contrast/brightness. These are actual magpie feathers with the correct amount of primary, secondary and tertiary feathers. The feathers that are sculpted have been UV'd using planar mapping which was straight forward. Each of the sculpted feathers have been adjusted to match the actual images i had, so the spines of the feathers and the shapes have all been individually tailored.

The final stage for the feathers is making a convincing bump map so the individual hairs coming from the spines look realistic. I have attempted this is Mudbox but i may be over thinking the process. creating some fine, closely bunched lines with some randomness will act pretty well when aligned with the flow of hairs on the feather and used as a bump map. So now the hurdle of creating a realistic feather, finding real feathers from a magpie and laying them out as a magpies wing looks (pictured below) the next big thing is producing a realistic wing and rigging it

Due to the amount of reference images, watching slow motion footage of birds flying and understanding the fact that a wing has a similar bone structure to a human arm i am confident with the rigging of the wing.