getting all the feathers on the dragon(at the same time)

I've bound and weighted the dragon. Because it was a very simple rig and the dragon is such a simple shape it didn't take very long(although it was very annoying doing the mouth which I modelled closed).

Now I'm trying to see if I can put all the feathers in the same scene without the computer crashing. To my surprise the computer handles them very well. Here's the first attempt where I've posed the dragon to see if the feathers move properly;

Some mistakes that I've made is that I forgot to freeze the feathers on the left side of the head so it still had a -1 value. This made the feathers on the head on the left side of the head move in the reverse direction off the head.

I'm happy with the way the body feathers stayed on the body but the feathers need to be stiffer because they stick out too much at the moment because of gravity and the movement of the dragon.

I'm thinking(or hoping) that the problem that I'm having with the wings is that I forgot to attach the feathers to the body.

After these issues are sorted out I'm going to work on having different coloured feathers. By the end I'll probably have 7 or 8 hair systems in the scene.

I've also been working on the bone ship but I've ceased posting pictures because the files are getting so large that I can't render them out without crashing the computer.

Yesterday me and Sarah were trying to get the camera from the end shot with ossues into the maya scene. The problem is that the scale from Nuke to maya is wrong and I can't shrink the camera movement on maya's end as far as I can tell. Sarah was trying to help on the nuke end by messing with the scale of the camera and putting a distance inbetween the tracking markers but it still imported into maya the same.

Even when I decided to scale up the model in maya it didn't seem to work, weirdly the camera seemed to scale up with the model (?!)

This is a big deal because the camera has to be about .002 of its current scale to work to the scale of the bone ship, at the moment it seems positively clumsy and lurchy  because it is so large.

This is extremely aggrivating as it would be possible for me to start rendering if we had the camera movement finalised.

Testing feathers with blendshapes

having a little bit of trouble with reversing the feathers(they're originally on the right side of the face). This is just a test to see how the feathers react with wrinkling the nose.

update on feathers

here's the finished version of the feathers on the face of the dragon, they're a little longer now. I still need to sort out the feathers on the nose in theory.

Otherwise I've modelled the dragon and have been starting to sort out the feathers on the wings. I spent all day yesterday trying to fix a twist on the feathers. I still don't know the exact reason why the feathers have started doing this as I managed to keep them straight when attaching feathers to other objects. Now I'm just going to go through individual folicles and correct the twist that way, there's few enough flight feathers on the wings to justify me doing it this way.

continueing character concepts

finished doing silhouettes for the remaining characters, now I can do some character portraits

wing tests, picture of the feathers on the face of the dragon

Just thought I'd post a picture as to where I'm at with placing the feathers on the face of the dragon. I have to sort out the feathers on the snout and in some other problem areas. To get it looking like this I have to have two hair systems, one on the top and one on the bottom with different clump twist values;

Otherwise I tried another way of making a wing system. Instead of using a script like wing creator I've actually just rigged up a wing that uses nhair feathers much like what I've done with the face of the dragon. The advantage with this is that I don't have to have a complex rig for the wings because I don't have to control the feathers, this is left up to the simulation;

I actually like the way it turns out in playblasts;(I had to reduce the quality some to get it to upload to the blog)

Links to feather tutorials and scripts and expiramenting with own rig

Pretty much figured out the feathers for the dragons head so now I'm looking at how to do the wings, I'm going to put the tutorials I find here so that I have all my info/links in one place

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xThiBnEyPs

script called wing creation tool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1bQmmPEHNM

Wing creator script

I've also tried making a mock up of a rig, I just wanted to see what happened when I used smooth bind on a wing with the feathers joined;

didn't work out too well, here's a playblast;

messing with it later I found out that the rig isn't actually too bad, it's just that I wasn't rotating the controllers

Tried having a look at the bald eagle rig in creative crash but I can't see the bones on it so I can't figure out how it works. It looks as though the feathers system is really complex too.

Odds and sods

Been up to this and that lately. Have been continueing trying to make the feathers sit right on the dragons head but it's a hard slog because even though there are scripts etc. there isn't a real magic bullet. So instead I'm methodically looking at all my tests and taking the bits that I like from some of them and putting them together then working on the problem areas deleting out individual curves and putting more in where needed.

Otherwise I'm working on my water report which is time consuming so while I've been waiting for it to simulate I did some concept art for Mose, one of his characters haley;

Further refined one of the concepts and made variations on it;