that tiger and the hair face are just incredible!
Hello folks,
Often I find myself intrigued by the wonders of our nature, and so one of these wonders are eagles that are the symbol of freedom, power and transcendence.
Created this for the cover art of 3D Artist magazine issue 74.
Maya and XGen were used for the feathers, ZBrush for sculpting and creating feather models and Arnold for rendering. Rest of the tools used are Mari, Nuke and Photoshop.
Thanks for watching,
Yasin
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This is fantastic, I posted a question recently about creating feathers, and I got no responses, maybe your a god sent angel to help me with this task, could you give us a little insight into the process, that would help greatly.
The image is amazing!!!
Thanks a lot and sure! In fact the tutorial itself is specifically about creating feathers. Obviously there are many approaches for feather creation, however, the most efficient method is one that gets your job done as quickly as possible while giving you artistic freedom, so there is some sort of a balance between automation and art-directability. The automation is done with instancing, the examples are the upcoming ZBrush nanomesh/micromesh, XGen, Yeti and so on, however each of these tools grant you a nice set of artistic tools to get the desired look. Thus, first of all assess what type of quality you need to achieve and how much time you have, then based on that you can easily define your workflow.
The way I did this was that I created a set of 12 individual feathers in ZBrush using mostly curveMultiTube brush and then distributed those on the model using XGen. Again as I said this decision was made after assessing various factors for my needs. Note that for the curveMultiBrush you should decrease Curve Snap Distance as much as possible to easily draw out the feather without having them interfere with each other, when done, do a ZRemesh on it and you have a feather ready! Below you can see the eagle model itself and the individual feathers.
Let me know if you had any question 
Great advice thank you so much, can you tell me how come you used curve tubes for the feathers and not fibermesh, what drove that decision?
Good question! It can totally be done with Fibermesh too, no problem at all, however, it may take a while aligning the strands accurately beside one another. I just wanted to have full control over the shape of the feathers so I decided to go with a full manual approach.
Thanks for the insight, I’m working on an eagle too, i’ll try it with fibermesh and see how well that comes out, clearly from your method, we can see… it works, I think i’ll try the alternative and see if that gives me such great results as yours. Awesome job.