Tar and Feather the Damn Thing!

The Deinonychus got some major work in the early evening of last night, after I found out my whole teaching future will be determined next week! No stress or anything.


So immediately I worked on upgrading her texture to Mark 5 levels.

Though effective, I feel this is the first shader set that has been dulled by the Mark 5avication... My Deinonychus shader was my best of the Mark 2 era. I remember completing it in 2008 and being quite proud of it.

At the same time the Mark 5 version looks pretty awesome. Just duller. The Mark 2 had such vivid colours. Oh well, progress and all that...
Since I have pretty much mastered my current shading technique, I've decided to move on and re tackle feathers... Can't improve if I don't try new things (and having ADD I get bored with repetitive tasks easily).

I wanted to add a light hairy undercoat of feathers. My first attempt (as usually with surface replicators) was this quite amusing version. She stuck a fork in an electric socket.

Also note the hideous red display feathers. Even at this stage I hated the colouration of these. They will be fixed later on. At the time I was enraged at the hair not working.

I got the angle on the feathers correct, it was now just a matter of rescaling and positioning them right. An interesting aspect of Carrara (one I forget 50% of the time... like this time) is that when you resize a replicator object (aka the hair) it changes the object's "anchoring" point. In this case that anchor was about an additional half length off the feather. Meaning in this pic all the feathers a floating above the body...

One correction of those anchoring points and presto chango! The feathers are exactly where they should be (darn straight! errr angled). Next problem they looked terrible due to my shading. They were too close to the skin colour.

So a touch more brown in the texture map and we had an excellent undercoat of hair like down. Now if only we could do something about those terrible display feathers...

A there we go!

I'm quite happy with this start. She is already getting the reptilian wolf look I was aiming for. Next comes down to her arms, legs, and FACE! Also some major display feathers for the tail and arms...