Flight: Making Eagle

 The final model for Eagle- posed

And from above

As with Meerkat I started off by gathering plenty of reference imagery, as seen earlier in the blog.  I then drew up some othographics.

 Modeling WIP:

Starting out I created the rough shape of the eagles head and body.

Created details such as the beak and legs separately before combining 

I then refined the shape until I was happy with it.

I created the basic shapes for the base of the wing, which I planned to later apply the feathers to as planes.



Partway through my modelling process I came across the tutorial below- which was rally great for seeing how someone else would approach modelling a bird

Added Blendshapes for expressions

Exploring transparency

I hand painted feathers in photoshop and applied the textures to planes.  I ended up having to do quite a bit of research into feathers and transparency mapping.  In the above image I experimented with threading in a separate transparency map (which didn't work in mental ray- I found out why later), or save my textures as tiffs with alpha channels  (right feather)

Originally I had thought to use a feather system to texture my eagle, and looked into a few options, such as the Dodo Master (only works on nurbs), This feather system script, and adapting a maya hair system.   Like with Meerkat though I decided against this in the end and began my texturing using Mudbox.    I actually textured the eagle before the Meerkat, so didn't quite have the technique down at this point.  

First texture option for Eagle

I ended up not being completely satisfied with my first texturing attempt, and I had difficult with the colours in Mudbox sometimes not appearing as I thought they should.   In the end I decided to re-texture from scratch in Photoshop, as i wanted more flexibility with my brushes. 

Photoshop Eagle texture

I used the feathers that I had created earlier and added these throughout the texture.  For my bump map I took elements from the normal map I had made in Mudbox and combined them into the textures bump map.

Bump Map

Spec

Feathers and Wing attempt

I brought all my feathers into Maya and began placing them to create the wing.  However I quickly realized that this was going to be a long, painful job.  I also noticed that I had issues with my feathers when the transparent planes intersected- and because I had not spent much time shaping them these could potentially happen quite often once i started animating.  I decided to give Wing Creator a try.  This brilliant script sets out your feathers and rigs the wings automatically, complete with blend shapes for feather movement.  I mapped my own feather textures onto the system and ended up with the wings below.   

Wings made using Wing Creator

I had to match these wings to my model by scaling the rig and moving the controllers. 

Completed rig

The rest of the rig was pretty simple, with set driven keys to control the eagles claws.