How to sculpt this type of plumage

#1

Hi guys ! i’m trying to figure out a workflow for sculpting a bird like this one :

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Bristol.zoo.white.stork.head.arp.jpg

The part that’s giving me grief is the feathers on the chest. i tried doing them with fibermesh, but when you have long wide fibers the groom brushes seem to behave very strange an chaotic.
Does anybody have any suggestions on how to do this ?

Edit :
I’ve noticed something weird, if i work on the fibers in solo mode with the grooming brushes everything behaves alot better , if there’s an other visible geometry in the scene the brushes make the fibers go ape sh#t, like they’re tring to snap tot the other geometry

Edit 2 :
Okay i think i’ve figured out what was going on, in the brush setting under fibermesh there’s a front collision modifier and a front collision variations modifier, if i put the front colision modifier low and the variations to 0 the brushes work pretty well for sculpting feathers :smiley:

#2

ever thought of micro meshing the feathers?
http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/3d-modeling/micromesh/

#3

micromesh deosn’t help because i need to be able to bake de feathers onto a lowres mesh

#4

i would rather bake the Bird rather then the feathers,
i dont think bake feathers taste very good

#5

they don’t have to taste good, just look good

#6

Consider using professional kitchen air vent or stove hood, because beside the taste baking the bird with the feathers will smell strongly :wink:

Why couldn’t you bake micromesh on lowres mesh ? Like if you convert micromesh to actual geometry, then you can bake a difference displacement map between the actual high res mesh with feathers and the low ( I don’t remember if zB can do that anyway xNormal do ).

I think you could even make it a 32bit disp map if you want killer displacement but maybe your target engine/app doesn’t support it…

Hope it will help you, tell us how you’ll handle it when you do :wink:

#7

i had no ideea micromesh could be converted to geo,i allways thought it’s render only, but i imagine the resulting mesh would be very difficult to hadle or groom

Thanks for the tip:D

#8

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