The conquest of Feathers...

So I've been working on 3D feathers for a year. Yeah you heard me. A year. You finally get to see the results now.

The exciting news is this part of a build up to a relaunch of The Tyrannosaur Chronicles. The video direction has hit crippling schedule conflicts (much like the Chronicles). The bad news is you might still have to wait a bit for Traumador's return. I'm taking the time to build up to an awesome return.

So in the near but undefined future (realistically probably late May) expect more Traum, New Zealand, Vivus-critters, and mythology. Plus several other surprises. So stay tuned.

These are my feathers, as of my 2010 revisit in March.

A little better than my old feathers. However verging on shag carpet. At the time they were better as I put them on in patches and could better control their orientation. Yet they still don't quite look realistic.

I re-approached the project this month. The results have been slightly spectacular.

This is feather kung-fu in comparison to my previous attempts.

Any thoughts from out there?

Bird or Dinosaur?

Okay once you see my Deinonychus, the answer to that last question will be obvious. However I can dare to dream I might confuse someone right?

So seriously, do these feathers look good or not?
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I spent a good deal of time REDOing the whole bloody lot!
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Turns out I have to custom replicate both sides of a single object for the objects to look good on both sides (rather then on nice and one bad!).

I've also started to add the ornamental feathers around the trims. There is still some work to be done here. I need to add some way smaller base fluff. However these are the large plums as I see them (unless anyone has reasonable suggestions).
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Oh and you might have notice I posed her... leading to the natural question how does it look with all its "gear" on?!?

I had the same wonder too. This is the answer.

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Not looking to bad. Not quite what I was aiming for... however I'm starting to like the Wolf-like look. Besides this was a rough and tumble predator in my head.

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I may very soon tackle a more proper prehistoric bird. For this I have a totally different game plan for the shading... First thing is first though. Finish this guy (and then my Ichthyosaur, and than the Dinosaur Olympics... what is a guy to do!).

Deinonychus has left the building...

The quest for feathers continues! (Well okay, the quest to improve feathers! I've had 3D feathers for a long time now...)


So I thought I'd proceed to the head, as I've never put feathers on there before.

Like always with 3D surface replicators (the tool I make 3D feathers, fur, and forests with) the first render was hilarious. That would be the Elvis Raptor above. If the model had been my Therizinosaur I'd say Logan from the X-Men, but Peter beat me to that already.

Comparing to the feathers I already had added to the body, here is what the sideburns looked like. Just that sideburns! Though if I ever wanted to make Dinosaur caricatures of people I now know how.

By altering the size of the face feathers a bit, and make them replicate thinner across the surface (as in fewer of them being copied) I got something a little more functional.

The face feathers still stick out a bit when compared to the whole, but at least they don't look like a hair do anymore.

A problem I'm encountering with feathers, just like shading, is that due to the much larger size and surface area of the body, things look different on it than on the small body parts...

After several years of this problem (through shading) I still have no clue how to solve this problem.

Of course having bad feather orientation doesn't help. As you can see on the arm and leg feathers when I first added them...

This is one thing about Carrara that drives me nuts. The surface replicator is ALMOST the perfect tool... Except it doesn't do anything the way it should!!!

Despite their orientation pointing towards the sky on my Dinosaur, the original feather object from which they were "replicated" is pointing diagonally towards the front of the scene and twisted 35 degrees differently?!? The correlation between your replicates and their master just doesn't make any sense at all. I could possibly work out the math on it, but that gets complicated when dealing with round angled objects...

I want to know why? (Granted I'm 2 editions behind on Carrara, and this was a prototype feature in my version... Hopefully the new edition [3 away from current program] coming out this year has better control on the replicators!)

I was able to correct the problem a bit after playing... Still the result isn't as good as I'd like.

However flipping the model to the other side I discovered that there is now also an issue with orientation on the other side. Meaning I'm going to have to feather this thing one side at a time!

GRRRRRRRR

What choice do I have though, in face of feathered theropods...

An electric shaver I say!

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...

You posed Raptors?!?

I returned to the Raptor today for a little bit.

Here is where I left it. Looking depressed, or caught in an extreme gravity well. I'm not sure?

I had my suspicions she was slightly off anatomically, but couldn't exactly compare her easily to any of the skeletals kicking around.

So I decided to correct this skeletal by Gregory Paul. It is a relatively easy procedure within photoshop. My only complaint about it is that this particular copy of the skeleton (I scanned from a book) seems to blur whenever I rotate piece of it. Oh well. I didn't need it to be too fancy.

My suspicions were correct, but not where I thought they'd be!

I was worried the arms weren't the right proportions, but it turns out apart from the first finger I was dead on! Pretty good considering I had just measured it from eye balling a book...

However last night I'd actually mucked up the proportions of the torso and neck. They were probably correct, but I'd thought they looked to short so I stretched them. Oops.

Readjusting them, and enlarging the skull we had a perfect match!

I might do a quick tutorial on ART Evolved about this technique, if people are interested. Not that it is that hard.

Unless they've learned how to be upgraded...

A riveting day of calling the Department of Education, and getting an answering machine. Calling again, and again the answering machine. Department, machine... The pattern continues. Yet the news keeps telling me they need teachers around here?!?

So after completing a couple odd jobs for my parents around the house, I decided to attack my Raptor model and bring it up to Mark 5. Which will probably be a reoccurring theme for a while...

Since the Deinonychus will be coming up for the first after Olympics Traumador post I decided to work on it. (My apologies to Traum's readership... this work related crap has me not in the mood to do more than one post every couple of days... I do really want to finish the Olympics sometime soon and get back on track).

This is what the old model looked like. Pretty good in its day, but that is long over.

Here is the beginning of the revamp. The model is finished, but not looking overly raptory due to the rod through body syndrome. I'm attempting this approach so that the model is poseable once rigged. Rigging caused a lot of bad distortion when they were pre-posed.

Simply because all the JP raptor cliches are running through my head a clip of JP fun!