Feathers

Feathers

The Feather object is a special Hair object that is specially designed for creating bird feathers. Follow these steps to create your own bird feathers:

1. Create one or more splines that will define the rachis.
   
   
2. Select the Feather object and make a spline a child of the Feather object.
   
   
3. The width and shape of the feather is adjusted using Barb Length in the Spacing drop-down menu.
   
   
4. You will see a special projection type, specifically for Feather objects, in the Hair Material Tag’s Hair UVs menu. With this projection type you can apply a texture (the first Texture field in the material’s Color channel) across the entire surface of a feather.
   
   
5. If you now copy this spline and create the rachis using a Sweep object, the result will be similar to the one below:
   
   
   Gaps were added intermittently.

Internally, the Feather object is also merely a special Hair object that can be influenced by feather-specific settings. You can convert a Feather object to a normal Hair object at any time (Make Object Editable or press the c-key). This will, though, convert each hair to a guide.

A tip if you want to experiment with the Feather object: The Hair material’s numerous channels can also be used influence the hair of the feather(s).