Attempting to sculpt feathers on this crow back, any suggestions for techniques apprecaited.
I’ve mostly been playing around with either scuplting with the clay build up and dam standard, and now been trying with masking and using deformation --> inflate, both not really creating a decent effect.
having a go at creating each feather as a subtool. still any tips or suggestions appreciated.
Definitely the last method you tried would be your best bet. However, instead of creating each feather as a separate subtool, you should create them all in the same subtool and make use of polygroups and mask by polygroup. That way you won’t have dozens of subtools to contend with.
So you can mask off and ctrl+drag the transpose line to duplicate each feather. This will, in turn, automatically mask everything else off and allow you place each feather as you create it.
Or alternatively, you could create several feather model variations, save them as insert mesh brushes and do it that way instead.
hey, cheers very much for the advice. thought i find using the transpose makes the edges super jaggedy, but working now with less subtools 
this is page 2 there is all so page 3 to see
www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial_detailed.php?id=523&catDisplay=1&roPos=1&page=2