I'm interested in animating a bird, but I find it pretty hard to make the feathers look realistic. I've figured out how to make the hairs wider, but they just end up looking chunky. Anyone know how to shape a hair, such as into the shape of a bird feather?

I could be totally off; maybe I shoudn't be using hair particles, but I can't think of any other particle system that is anyhow related to hair particles.

Thanks a lot!

-The Bird Man

I'm not totally 100% sure but I think you can use displacement maps to control the shape of hair as well as combing it in v13. I have played with it by combing it and the combinations and shapes you can get are pretty good. You'll have to try the displacement map yourself.

You can edit the hair properties in the timeline eg thickness and brightness and color etc over the length of the hair from 0 to 100 % being the base and tip respectively. Check out my little chickadee - I used a decal to drive the surface color of the hair and various adjustments in the timeline editor or channel editor to get a downy type feather. You can also emit an image of a feather or a decal as the hair.
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=18934&hl=

Maybe you should try to use a hair-image... Get a feather.image of your choice, give it a alpha-channel(if it doesnt have one) and use it as a hair-image... that will help you...

*Fuchur*

you can change hair shape(thickness) by using the "time line". in the hair attribute right click thickness and click "time based" then goto to the time line you can chage the thicknes per percentage.

heres an example:
the dog like character you see is using the hair system but note instead of the hair being lines there well...larger. and the grass speaks for it self.

http://johnl.inform.net/pages/flower.swf.html

Check tutorial section for some hints on all topics

JohnL- I get a dead link there...
Yes, you will want to use a feather image to 'drive' the hair shape and color. You will also want to model the birds wing and groom the hair flat to conform to it. Post an image of what you are attempting and we can be a lot more helpful... Birdman!

http://johnl.inform.net/pages/flower.swf


try this if you are on Mac


I should put this into a qt