face mapping problem, making feathers

[Stresspill]

well I managed to get all maps facing to the same direction now. It was flipped normals that caused that problem. But now only way to get maps look right is to turn faceted option on in the material editor. This causes some invisible edges to get visible were they should not be. if faceted option is not turned on maps get very dark (black) on halfway.

like this

[Ls3D]

Extruded edges and faces are notorious for mapping and smoothing issues. Faceted is like below phong shading and forces a no smoothing group situation.

My sugg. - change your approach, work with face mapped quads via an explosion of a profile object, (or select by smoothing groups and delete alternate faces - even if you have to resmooth with low theshold settings) this could produce more faces quickly and with predictable mapping, then with some local rotation you just might get great results. Another way would be to clone the correctly mapped polys, or to put a new mapping icon onto the suboject poly, align to normal, fit center etc - more tedious for sure.

Hope this inspries more than confuses.

[subagio]

There are about a billion ways to do this. For last months modelling challenge I did the bird in my image in 1/2 an hour (didn't have any time) by creating one feather (all geometry), creating a small patch, then building a whole wing out of it (square), then ffd-ing it into shape, then skinning it with bones to pose.

If I were to do it properly again, I'd do similar (with alpha maps and more attention to the scalling of the various tiers of feathers), but use a Surface deformer and a Nurbs control surface to shape it with greater precision.

If I were at home, I'd even try doing it with ShagFur instead (I have a license at home, but no licences here at work, we're a gaming house). I did an image a while ago where this worked decently, and that Blizzard crow in the (is it?) Warcraft 3 trailer does it the same way afaik.

--C

[Stresspill]

Thanks for good tips. The problem with the black textures disappeared after I cleared all smoothing groups. I did all the body feathers by hand via extruding faces. With good opacity map and texture it should be good enough.

for the wing I think I'm gonna use geometry and planes with opacity mapping for smaller feathers. Just have to go and find some feathers and doves for the scanner :)

I was planning to render this with Brazil public alpha but it doesn't support opacity maps. bugger..

[BenBarker]

http://www.ups.edu/biology/museum/wingphotos.html

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