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Songbird Remix's Product Preview Thread

Ken Gilliland

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
I threw in a quickie texture to get a feel for what I doing. It's not too embarrassing so I'm sharing it.

I have a template with 8 different variation of the feather but for the sake of testing I simply repeated it 7 times for the test. It also doesn't have any specular maps yet to give the iridescence qualities.

Render 1.jpg

On thing is clear, I need to make the feathered strands more dense so the eye feathers aren't as 'airy' on top (although the density is correct for the white hybrid peafowl). The "eye" of the Eye Feathers need to be bigger, too. I'm pretty happy though with the "T" feathers.

I also need to deal with whatever geometry issue is causing the blemish in the inner row feather row. I included a rear view. For those of you who didn't know, peafowl do have additonal regular set of tail feathers for flight. The spectacular "tail" that is iconic among peafowl is known as the "train" which parts in the middle when in flight (yes, peacocks do fly-- though only very short distances).
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
Yes, but it tends to be impressive when they do it. There are photos on the internet showing them airborne. (I've seen them roosting in trees)
 

Rae134

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
There is a theme park near me that has tigers. Besides seeing them lazing around they have a short show that shows off tiger behaviours, one such being how long they can jump. They have 2 really large logs separated by quite a distance (can't remember how long) where they have a tiger jump between the 2. Once while they were doing this, a peacock flew past and instead of the long jump the tiger jumped up and got it. Cant argue with nature although there were a few traumatised kids (and probably some parents too)
 

Ken Gilliland

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
We have a "pride" (group) of wild peafowl that regularly try to visit our yard. My wife chases them off because our Cockatoo loses it whenever a bird bigger than she goes it "her" yard. Also, peafowl are notorious for perching/resting atop cars (ruing the finish) and my wife doesn't want them anywhere near our Teslas. In any case, the chase almost anyways ends up with them flying atop our roof and them, plus the cockatoo, screaming for hours. It's a love/hate relationship, we love them, especially when they are a few blocks from our house.

Picture: "Wow. This yard looks like a great place to hang out-- except that Cockatoo is a pretty noisy neighbor and that crazy lady keeps chasing us".
DSC_4520.JPG
 

Janet

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
As beautiful as they are peacocks can be annoying. There was a small farm across the street from my sons' elementary school and the peacocks were always getting loose and running around the street that led to the school.

Speaking of names for groups of birds:

 

Ken Gilliland

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
I wonder if that last Seagull made it out from being wrapped up in the towel.

I hope so... I think they would have reported it, had it not survived.... but the story sort of reminded me of "The Big Year" where a woman tries to retrieve her scarf coated in "fish scent" and the gulls have a different idea.
 

Ken Gilliland

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
The peacock continues to offer huge challenges for me. While working on the "Train", numerous rigging issues presented themselves. Because of the "display" vs. the folded feathers, no easy rigging solution works. I originally thought I could place 5-6 folded tail controllers (aka ghost bones) to control the folded tail. Yes, that works but when the tail is in "display" those controls go crazy. I thought about starting the base model in a folded train position but that just reverses the issues. Because I like to animate, the train needs to be able to spread while raising for the display. The solution is going be a large number of "bend", "side", 'twist" and shaping morphs for a folded train... there's just no other way to do it. Given the polygon size of the train-- the final model may be a low end computer killer. The hundreds of stacked transparency mapped feathers slowed even my computer down a little while rendering.

The morphed train feathers will have 6 bend points. Here's a render using a couple of them, again using my "test" train texture. It will also have side-to-side controls and several stray feathers and fan controls. I think I'm well enough along with the model that I'll start to build some base texture maps in the next week.

Render 3.jpg
 
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JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
Do the tailfeathers actually bend that much? I know they have a degree of flex, but I'd expect the curve to be shallower (although if it's rigged, then it would be up to whoever is posing it).

I can imagine that it *would* be a hassle and a half trying to rig a whole bundle of feathers like that.
 
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