feathers (2)

[rjducey]

Hi
i'm doing an animation which involves a fair number of birds, well chickens to be precise ( no i'm not ripping off For the Birds or Chicken Run)
and i'm trying to work out the best way to do feathers. i want to be able to have the control to be able to ruffle the feathers in specific areas

i'm thinking of using fur to do it-make the base width and tip width thicker, and reduce the opacity of the tip a bit. this works ok.
i was wondering if it is possible to map an image onto each strand of fur, or use an tip opacity map to get a rounded end-and if so, how the heck do i do it?
otherwise, is it possible to use fur as the placement and aniamtion tool ( i like the attractors thing) and then use the fur strands's position and replace them with geometry feathers?
or write a script? (if this, any help on writing the script will be greatly appreciated)

any other suggestions greatly appreciiated
thanks

[naythen]

I would suggest combining techniques. Try using geometry and shaders with fur as filler, the downy soft feathers. Depending on how animated your birds are, you may want to look into using something similar to Olivier Junquet's tutorial on animating leaves with dynamics. You can apply the same principles to feathers. You may also want to look at the Jackal's Forge tutorial on a wing. I don't think that fur is really designed for doing feather shapes, but you could use it to cover feather geometry. Hope that helps.

"The Geek shall inherit the earth."

[joojaa]

FYI Renderman can do excactly what u want. Most film makers use renderman instead of maya standard renderer. Worth the consideration. Se www.pixar.com

[rjducey]

thanks
i would too if i could afford it
wanna gimme renderman?

[joaomontenegro]

You can map an image on to partcal sprites. Make you chicken live, partical tool - sketch paritcals - draw them on you r bird. Create material, assign a feather with alpha to the color, Then change the partical to sprite than
and assign the material to the partical.
The problem with this is that the sprite always faces the camera. Russ

[spudk]

Let me know what you find. I am starting to get to developing shaders for my big fat chicken character and if I could figure out the best way to feathers that would be great.
Here is an avi of him btw...
http://www.wavefarm.com/~spud/movies/chic360.avi

[gwascak]

Go check out www.zoorender.com. There is a tutorial in there about building a bird. It'll give you a different approach.