Take flight in style with a pro workflow for avian grooming
With its super modern handling of geometry and elegant networking, the brand new Feather tools give Houdini artists an incredible level of creative freedom for making realistic bird feathers. That’s what we’ll discover today as I guide you through creating a feather coating for a noble eagle, starting from making a basic shape to a range of changes you can use to develop a highly realistic render. You can also follow along with the walkthrough thanks to the scene file available in the 3D World resources.
01 FEATHER BASE
Grooming the eagle’s head begins with the creation of one feather. The shape of the feather should be similar to the shape of most of the feathers you’re going to create. At this stage we make only the main silhouette of the feather without any details, which we’ll add for realism much later.
To get going, start at object level and go to Templates. Create three curves that will indicate the left edge, centre and right edge of the feather, and connect them to the first input of the Feather Shape Organize node.
01
02 MORE CONNECTIONS
Create some curves to give the barb direction and curvature, and connect them to the second input of the Feather Shape Organize node. Next you’ll need to connect the Feather Shape Organize node to the ‘Feather Template from Shape’ node.
02 & 03
03 ADJUST PARAMETERS
The parameters of the ‘Feather Template from Shape’ node are intuitive. You can play with them to understand precisely what’s responsible for what. I’d suggest setting the values as seen in picture 02&03. At this stage any small deviations in values aren’t important. What is important is that this node has a short and understandable name, as in the future you’ll refer to it through the name attribute. Having $OS in the Name parameter means the name of the node will be written to the Name attribute. Finally, end the chain with the Null node, which will serve as an output.
04 GUIDE GROOM NODE
Still working at the object level, go to Feathers. Create a Guide Groom node and connect the eagle head geometry to its second input, and VDB to the third input. The first input is used to connect previously created pens and in this case can simply remain unconnected.
With this node you’ll create all the feathers for the Eagle’s head. In the Feathers tab, specify the link to the output that you created earlier, and in the template Group parameter dropdown menu find the name of the feather that you created earlier. Enable Mirror Groom and in the Orient Attribute Name field write ‘barborient’.
