So I’m trying to cleaning up all those old unfinished projects that I have lying around and I finally finished this piece. It’s rendered in BPR and comp was done in Photoshop. I wanted to try to do feathers with ZBrushs fiber mesh feature. It works good since you can see what happens with your grooming at all times, but there are some issues I would be happy if Pixologic would look into.

1.  Add a feature to the brush menu that prevents fibers from rotating along it’s axis when “preserve length” is active.
2. Combine fibermesh subtools without destroying the grooming ability on the resulting subtool.
3. Vary textures within a subtool. I felt that the feathers looked a bit monotomous, but I tried to avoid it as mouch as I could by having separate subtools for the different feather areas.
4. Add binding of fibermesh to another mesh object. Let’s say you’re in a production pipeline and you have groomed a characters fur in T-pose. An animator is going to pose the model and the director want’s you to rerender or fix the grooming for that specific pose. Importing the pose is no problem, but the fur is not reshaped to fit the new pose. I would like it so that the fiberMesh remembers wich subtool and polygon it comes from and therefore it can calculate the new normal and position of the polygon so that the FiberMesh can be adjusted to the new pose.