Custom DAZ Template for Feathered Wings

Ah my. I thought I sympathized before when my fellow artists Ankokou, Stryde, and Mal would mention drawing feather after feather after feather after feather. I did, after all, once scale an entire dragon by hand.

But feathers are another matter entirely XD

After three long nights, I've created a brand new texture map for the "Feathered Wings" product I bought. I rebuilt it from the ground up - base, shading layers, and lighting layers - so that I could have more texture when the wings are rendered. Making my own template for it will also let me fully customize wing colors and markings in the future - tweaking the color swaps that came with the model wasn't cutting it.

There are some things I'll be adjusting, to make the shorter feathers blend better with the others, and adjusting a little of the shoulder feather section since it stretches out when applied to the model. But overall, I'm happy, and my arm wants a rest from all the digital painting that went into this XD

For the curious, the inset at the lower right is made from a couple snippets of the jpeg texture file. That's what I repainted within Photoshop. There's a spot for each and every feather on the model, plus the shoulder area. I've shown where the particular feather-blocks correspond to the rendered model. Bless the copy-paste function, because I didn't have to hand-paint each individual feather, there's just three main versions that were duplicated about 10 times each for the different feather sections. The shoulder area, however... Heh, well, that was quite a few hours of tonights work and it was flat-out stroke-by-stroke feather painting.

I'm going to leave the template as it is for now, and begin testing it for color for the Ress and Huntress Light renders, to make sure that everything will work properly. Cross your fingers for me! The high contrast of the feathers as they are now will likely be diminished as I work color into the image, which will make things more realistic. Here's hoping I don't have to tweak too much on the shading and lighting layers

There's a strange glitch in the render on the right-hand side where it looks like someone airbrushed the primaries... not sure how that got there, it doesn't exist on the texture file or in the program. I'll be keeping an eye out for it in future renders.

And... yes, that's a floating necklace back there. It's hidden in one of the layers I turned off to isolate the wings and I didn't feel like chasing it.

Resources:
DAZ|Studio 4
Photoshop
Wacom Bamboo Capture Tablet <3
Feathered Wings Model by etujedi
Fully repainted original texture template by HuntressLight, based on etujedi's map parameters.
20-35 hours? With food and toddlebit cuddle breaks.