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Feather system development


monkibase

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Hello everyone!

 

Right now I'm in a process of doing feather system for my character. I'm doing it based on the fur system - I'm taking its guide curves and adding a sweep on them to get patches. Right now I'm working on orienting them right. 

When I get some decent result I'll show it, but for now I want to know, does any of you have some ideas of how to do feather system? Maybe someone already did one and know where to start?

 

post-12134-0-22130400-1410628519_thumb.j

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That's kinda a tough one, I'm not really all that familiar with Houdini's uv toolset outside of the common place stuff like projection and what not.  But if your system was only going to have patches, I would think the simplest and most reliable method would be to set the uv coordinates yourself.  Basically get the corners of the patch and stick them at 0,0 1,0 etc then interpolate the rest.

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OK, here what I have now xD

https://vimeo.com/106248107

 

I used custom uniform scatter for the feather roots. Found the idea how to do this here: http://schnellhammer.net/blog/?s=uniform . But I added paint density function to this. 

Then I copied necessary attributes from the fur system guides and replaced them with my scatter points. So If necessary I still can edit them with fur brushes. At last I added patches with CopySOP, added some twist attributes.

 

So what do you think? Patches intersect with each other a bit, but I think with the texture it will be ok. Also I want to take color info from the body and to texture patches with it using ramp.

post-12134-0-29695800-1410839867_thumb.j

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https://vimeo.com/106556879

Flower here! xD

I added some shape animation driven by velocity vector to fake cloth effect. Also cleaned some nodes, found some errors xD I think I'm pretty happy for now - I'll start to color them. Maybe some of you have some advice on feather behavior.

 

nice start...

one type of test you should do soon is feathers on deforming geometry.

well, that bouncing ball was a cached animation from maya. But yeah, I'm doing it for a character, so there would be character tests.

 

 

try recording the distance of the points on the feather upon the feather below it,
and then maintaining that distance, this will stop intersection when animating the object.
don't have a file but I found this to be key ;)

 

post-12134-0-35982800-1411098016_thumb.j

this are my scatter points - they can maintain the distance between them. And I can increase the radius of the wires and turn on selfcollision. But I think they move more or less together so it is OK. 

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Thanks everyone!

 

I had some time to work on this a little bit more. So I refreshed the video file. Now it also has a bonus fancy closeshot xD

 

Also I cleaned up my asset and want to share it with you guys.

 

 

So what is it:

Feather system based on wire dynamic simulation. Originally it was based on the fur system but now there is only few nodes left from it. It also has cloth-like behavior to make animation smoother.

you can:

- paint attributes such as comb, length, density,texture blending.

- texture each feather, color all of them using skin texture.

- blend multiple feather textures together

- ruffle feathers, mystique effect.

- supports custom imported curves. For example I created some curves in blender and used them to drive feathers.

 

Some issues for now:

- it intersects. Because it is not a cloth sim but the wire sim feathers doesn't know about their neighbors so they can intersect. However when there are a lot of feathers and they all have proper alpha texture you won't see it much.

- mystique effect needs to be polished. Just need to add ramp parameter to control bending.

 

Also I want to share it on orbolt. So I would like u to test it and say what do you think. 

 

Owly_feathers.zip

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