Subscribed to the thread and looking forward to seeing how it works out!
Can’t wait to see how it will look!
The feathers look awesome!
thanks guys!
I just finished adding most of the wing feathers!
Tried rendering it for the first time and was pretty happy with how it’s looking.
All critique welcome!
more to come 
Looks nice. But, the feathers in your render do not look anything like the ones you made earlier in this thread. Ore these just place holders or did you decide to go a different route?
Edit: never mind I see that you mentioned these are proxy feathers.
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What an awesome attempt so far, cannot see this turning out any other way than great.
Craaaaaaazy man!
Looking good!
Absolutely loved your glowing turtle project,
can’t wait for this 
thanks everyone!
now to replace the low res place holders with the high res…ooh boy :spin:
awesome looking bird.
Very interesting workflow.
The feather modeling is really cool.
I’m not convinced by the shading so far but I believe once you’ll get your night tone set, this could become just an amazing picture…
Looking forward to it
Thanks pieriko!
I totally agree about the shading - it’s not very convincing as-is. Let’s just say it was a proof of concept shader then 
I’m hoping it’ll be easier to make a convincing feather shader when I can see how it looks on all the feathers at once
Tomtuko, could you throw me a link or two to help me understand how you are doing the particle system? It sounds really useful.
thanks!
ok, so I haven’t touched this project since October… but now I’m back at it!
some hand-painted textures:
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If you still want the feathers with a lot of strand detail, try the hair particle system, its really fast to make them and saves A LOT of memory, especially if you use child particles and only a few control particles. This one is 1000 real particles and takes a lot less than your curve version.
As a test this took 5 minutes to model, generate and comb into a rough feather shape.
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Thanks AdamTM
I tried making a particle system like the one you described when I was first experimenting with making feathers. I discovered a couple problems with this approach though:
- They can’t be properly texture painted
- Spacing between the emitted hairs isn’t consistent like it is on real feathers
- The comb tool is really finicky and makes it easy for strands to overlap eachother
Last weekend I wrote a script that converts my proxy feathers to the high res ones:
it adds a ton of of loop cuts down the length of the feather, then converts each added loop cut into a curve. It assigns the bevel/taper objects to the curve, then converts it back to a mesh so it can be projection-unwrapped for texturing.
I could use this script on every feather, but I’m not sure this will give me the best looking results.
These feathers are extremely slow to render. At first I didn’t think this would be a problem - it’s fine with me if the final image takes a day to render - but then I realized long render times mean fewer iterations for lighting and shading. Since lighting and shading is a lot more important than the almost-imperceivable details in the feathers, I think textures really are the way to go for the strands.
Great Work, with the modelling and feathers, Have you positioned the feather on the model manually?