Welcome back to another episode of “sitting on a cube”, in which I show off another model that I’ve just finished and haven’t gotten around to doing anything with, but don’t want to wait until I make something more involved to show them off, hence the cube. Expect to see lots of cubes in the future, pretty much one for each new model I suspect.
 
I wanted to make an avian character to explore how to go about making a feathered character. I’ve got a decent handle on fur, and simple scales are fairly easy, I figured if I could get feathers down it would be a big step toward covering my ‘furry fandom’ bases, with those being the three main types of critter you see.
 
Honestly I expected it to be fairly simple, I had a good idea how to go about it. Unfortunately, it ended up being an exercise in frustration. I was doing everything right but no matter what I tried I just couldn’t get what I wanted to do to work! Eventually I discovered why, and unfortunately it turns out not to be my fault. It’s a bit hard to explain, but for those with some Blender knowhow, my main method was to model a few feather shapes, use the particle system to distribute them, and then use a texture coordinate node to have the feathers pick up the colours of the model based on where they are emitted from. Should have worked, should be easy peasy. Turns out it does work- in cycles. But for some reason it just arbitrarily doesn’t work in Eevee, instead putting the entire UV map on each feather, which doesn’t look very good.
 
This is pretty frustrating. I don’t really want to go back to using cycles if I can get good results with eevee due to it being so much silly faster. Which means my only real fallback is to just use fur and try to ‘fake’ it for the most part. I’ve got modelled feathers for her tail and her crest, the rest is just poiny fur. There’s not much else I can do for now, so I just tried to make it look as good as I could.
 
It’s far from perfect, this model will need some pretty heavy work before it’s ready for prime-time, but I think it’s at least looking alright. And ‘alright’ is about the stage I like to start sharing things, so… I hope y’all enjoy it. :P