While it is time consuming to render I've got my work flow on the feather base coat and over coats to near clock work. Apart from the odd replicator malfunction I can feather a body part every 40-60 minutes (with most of that being rendering time).
Undercoat.
Overcoat.
Feathers beyond the coats may be another story. How do these primary feathers look beyond placement (which frankly I'm not worried about as we don't know where the feathers on Troodon were).
The digits aren't finished either. I'm debating whether the fingers should be feathered or not too. The toes won't so I can play with my new scaling trick there.Thoughts or input? (Okay including primary feather placement... Albertonykus :P)
1 comment:
For what it's worth, primary feathers are only the wing feathers attaching to the finger. Wing feathers attaching to the forearm are secondaries, and those on the upper arm are tertials. (Cue diagram: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Birdwing.svg) It appears that true tertials are only in the short-tailed birds (confuciusornithids et al.), so you don't have to worry about them. What you have here currently with the gap between the body and wing feathers is pretty good. The secondaries are also fine as far as I can tell.
Big tail feathers are known to be variable among feathered dinosaurs, either restricted to the tip (Microraptor, Sinornithosaurus, Jeholornis, Scansoriopteryx, Caudipteryx, Protarchaeopteryx, Similicaudipteryx) or along the entire length of the tail (Archaeopteryx, Anchiornis, Jinfengopteryx). Hard to say which is the ancestral state, but in other words you can do almost anything with them. (Personally I'd go with along the entire tail as out of those Jinfengopteryx is probably closest to Troodon.)
For that matter, you can probably get away with doing whatever you like with the big leg feathers as well. For the record, what you have here somewhat resembles the condition in the microraptorine specimen "Dave". (Jinfengopteryx has no big leg feathers at all, there's a specimen of Sinornithosaurus that may preserve some, Microraptor, Anchiornis, and Pedopenna have essentially hind wings, and Archaeopteryx also has long-ish leg feathers similar to a hawk. Note the ones with hind wings have their leg feathers attached much lower than what you have here, below the ankle and on the foot. All of which is just the long way of saying that these are too variable and the phylogenetics currently too convoluted here to detect much of a pattern so do what you like.)
Long story short, I think you're doing fine so far.
I certainly recommend feathering the fingers (preferably with primary feathers). There just isn't any evidence at all of either scales on the fingers or loss of primary feathers in paravians even though almost everyone reconstructs them that way. It's one of those stubborn paleoart memes.
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