Dinobird: Render

Renders of the bat wings using Maya mentalray.

Renders of the feathered wings, again using mentalray in Maya.

I'm not sure which of the two I prefer, the feathered wings blend in with the rest of the model better than the membrane wings and I also feel that I have painted and textured them to a higher level than the membrane wings, they also add more colour however the membrane wings have a much more prehistoric look to them.

For now this is finished however I plan to still work on this model and add alpha mapped feather textured planes to blend the wings and the body better and also some long colourful feathers maybe on the end of the tail and at the back of the head to give more detail. I plan to do the same with the camel model.

Dinobird: Membrane wings: Paint and opacity

 I had some problems with the lower and thiner parts of the wings where any paint would seep through to the other side making it difficult to get a clean look. To fix this I first tried using orient to surface with the reasoning that this would select only the side of the mesh that I wanted to paint however this didn't work as expected. After this I used flood from camera so the paint would be evenly distrubuted across the wing mesh which is the only mesh unlocked. This worked well and produced the above effect.

These are my references for membrane wings, I have used the top and bottom for projecting and reference of the top of the wings and the middle for the incandescence of under the wings.

I have also edited the colours on the top side of the wings, I'm not sure I like how this looks however so I may return them to their original colour. I have also discovered opacity layers in Mudbox which I have used to make the skin between the limbs semi-transparent. I will test this when I export the model to Maya to see how light travels through.

 

Here I have changed the colour back

I might try and add some holes to the wings making them look a bit more worn and aged as well as maybe some scars.

This is the current state of the membrane wings version of the model

I removed the feathers from the end of the tail as they looked strange so I flattened and smoothed the end into a point more like a lizards tail, I may add more feathers using Maya planes to both the back of the head of the dinobird and the end of the tail.

Dinobird: Membrane Wings

I thought it would look effective to have the membrane wings transparent in the areas which would be just skin so I exported the Mudbox mesh as an .fbx to Maya and applied different materials to it. On exporting back to mudbox this didn't carry over so I will continue painting the wings as a solid object then maybe add an opacity map at the end.

Dinobird: Wings

Today I have been aligning and fixing the distance between the mirrored wings (folded feathered) in Maya so I can import the highpoly export and the low poly for UV's so I can then paint in detail. To do this I used an export of the dinobird body and inputted distances till the right high poly wing aligned then did the same for the right low poly and then the same for the opposite left wings but inputting minus.

 

Added detail to the black and undersides of the wings, now need to refine the underside detail and add detail to the coloured outside

 

I then added normals by using the layer of feathered detail from photo reference.

 

 I think that the sculpted feather are interfering with the feather normals so I will smooth them out to allo wmore detail to show through

Dinobird: Eye

 

 

Added a sphere for the eye and painted it in.

Also painted in more detail to the beige front feathers so they look less flat

I've been interested to see how this would look with membrane wings instead of feather wings, these aren't finished and could do with being posed in a more natural position, prehaps dropped a little or maybe folded. I will most likely continue the feather texture over the backs of the wings with the inside being light blue skin, maybe with a orange or red pattern to match the bill.