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.
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…