Spent the morning severing and reattaching toes to bring y’all a lovely pair of bird’s feet!
Aren’t they charming?
I modeled the scales using simple subdivided planes and a combo of subsurf + shrinkwrap + solidify + bevel modifiers to put off sculpting for as long as humanely possible. They’re rigged for now to check how they look when moving, but they’ll actually be used to bake maps for the multiple LOD bird versions.
Now, I have to tell you something: Rigging the feet was hell. A fun challenge, yet simultaneously annoying as hell!
Simple rigging won’t cut it. You can ignore jerky movements when it’s a model for static posing, but this is not one of these. When your goal is something easy to animate, ensuring the transitions of automated gestures are smooth becomes vital.
~ I could play with making it jump all day long ~
Next stop
Wings, refining the mouth then rigging the eyes. Texturing and sculpting come only after all rigging seems ok. Except for the beak + feet roughness mask I’m relying on procedural maps while topology may still change, and I trust my 2D skills—so no need for tentative previews. (:
And the feathers… I’m afraid I’ll be forced to sculpt them. I know of a costumes store with a high chance of carrying the white feathers I need to create the maps, but in times like these going to the buzzing center of one of the most populous cities in the world is out of question.
Anyway, new references dump!
I want this book so badly, but dollar has been skyrocketing. 
All of this guy’s videos!
Blinking bird
