Notice the crashing of the middle feather into the left most feather? To fix this we can first set a morph target in the selected subtool by pressing, Tool:Morph Target:StoreMT.
To lift the middle feather out of the other, we’ll set:
Brush:Elastic .
Alpha = Alpha00.
Stroke:Dots .
Z Intensity = 15 with Zadd on.
As we build up strokes over the feather, you can see it gradually lift out from the bunch, leaving the feather’s detail. If you look closely, I accidentally pulled too much of the underlying surface through the inactive subtool.
Switch to the Morph brush, adjust brush size and intensity to suit, and push back any over extended surface.
Give the model a once over and look for any more areas that need this kind of attention. We are almost to the end.
Fluffing the Feathers :
Remember that extra subtool that was our backup, named BirdHead? Select it and make sure it is at the highest subdivision. Turn the visibilty of the clones off. Create a New 3D Layer if you haven’t already done so and begin drawing on feathers like before except this time, they are not to touch each other. You don’t need to cover the whole bird but check your reference. In this case, the back of the neck is a good area along with the side of the neck. Basically you just want to break up the silhouette and give a feel of some depth to the feathered area.
Now under Tool:Layer move the layer slider back to 0, go to E Smth and S Smth and slide both down to 1. Lastly, move the Thick slider down to 0. Press Make 3D.
You should now have a new subtool created based on the strokes just made from the BirdHead subtool resting on the very surface of the subtool from which they were made.
Next:
Return to the BirdHead subtool and make it visible.
Move the 3D Layer slider back to 1 so the feathers are visible once again.
Reselect the LayerSkin subtool with the feathers and press Tool:Geometry:Divide once.
Select Brush:Zproject.
Select Alpha:Brush00.
Set Stroke:Dots.
With Zadd on, we’ll now brush over the layerskin feathers until they take on the detail of inactive subtool above it. You may find you get better results projecting, by rotating the model to where the area you wish to project is parallel to the screen. Also make sure X symmetry is off for this part. If you wish, you can sculpt in more detail to make these feathers unique.
After you are satisfied with the indiviual feathers, we’ll paint a mask over one of the feathers. Invert the mask, and invoke Transpose mode by pressing ‘ w’. Create an action line on the feather by clicking near its top, and dragging to near its bottom. You can now use the Transpose rotate feature and lever the feather away from the body.
Don’t forget the middle circle of the Transpose action line can be used to twist the feather on the axis of the action line. Clear the mask when done and select a new feather to begin the adjusting process. Feel free to turn the visibility of the Birdhead subtool on to get an idea of how much to rotate the feather from the rest of the body.
When you have all the feathers positioned, turn on all essential subtools for evaluation. If there are still sorting issues with the feathers, use the Elastic brush like mentioned above or even try the Move brush to correct aggressive clipping.
And finally... Looking back in hindsight, I would have liked to have tried consolidating the the subtools into fewer, by Zprojecting details from one entirely onto another. This may require retopology again but may be worth a try in the future.
I hope this tutorial was helpful and assists you in your getting desired results in your future projects.
