Hi everyone, I found this amazing render but I wasn’t able to find any information regarding who made it or how. Do you have any idea what techniques were used to make this model? Might it’ve been sculpted? Sculpting every single strand would be a pain but I think it can’t be as simple as a plane with alpha either?
There’s a super good plugin for Maya called jcFeather, it allows you to do any kind of feather. As long as curves are renderable you’re good (depends on render engine).
You can do this by painting a high-res detailed feather image with a alpha map, paint two versions, one in black and white for the bump, and then one for the colour input, then apply to a subdivided mesh and bend it to take the shape. For the hairs you could use the hair particles on a vertex group or use bezier curves. For the shaft of the feather you could apply a blend to the material, on a shaped cylinder. White/yellowish for the Rachis part and brown/redish for the Calamus part.