Trouble sculpting a winged statue

Varolokkur

I got burned out on my work a while back and want to return to finishing this UE5 environment project. That said I am having trouble with the wings on this sculpt, in particular getting everything to line up realistically as an outstretched wing should. Also, the sculpt is supposed to be rock as if a person was turned to stone, so the feathers cannot be 2d with an opacity mask but a fully 3d connected structure. Is there a better way I can go about this than I am currently?

Alex_J

is it zbrush? 

my preference would be to do anything that requires a lot of transform manipulation and selections in a regular 3d program like blender or maya. You wouldnt need any special techniques to do it there other than just group feathers into layers so you can select them easy. If you set pivot point to the base of the feather then it is easy select a group and rotate them all intuitively. 

Once you place them in your 3d app you can turn into a shell and then bring to zbrush if you need to sculpt on them further. If that is what you will do, I'd just sculpt one feather of each type in zbrush and then do placement in the 3d app by duplicating. That way can get the UV and bake done more efficiently and not have to transfer UV's later. 

Joopson

My advice would actually be to look at sculptures of wings, especially stone carvings, to see what simplifications they make. If you look at these sculptures, you'll see an emphasis on form over detail; the detail's mostly just there to sell that individual feathers make up the larger structures. You never see individual feathers fully disconnected, because it would be too weak-- in the same way, it would be a real pain to sculpt in zbrush as a 3D mesh that way.

Personally I'd probably model the shape of the wing akin to one of these, and sculpt in the feather detail.

Varolokkur

Good tips, thank you both! I'm thinking I should try the latter suggestion even if modeling all that feather detail is a pain. Thinking even if I wanted it like a completely realistic wing that geometry of individual feathers would make UVing and cleaning up the mesh a nightmare.

Klunk

there's a wing tutorial in  vertex3