Meet the Owl from Boids Of A Feather. He's one of Max Bigg's heavies, a right-hand man, door bouncer, and security for the Cuckoo Club downtown nightclub. Not too bright for your average owl, but a real doorstop of a bird. Owl, and several of his other colleagues, were built in the twilight hours over a few months of hectic modeling, rigging, and texturing. The work began in earnest back in the beginning of 1999 for Hash Inc. to demo at SIGGRAPH 1999.
Here are some of Owl's original render samples made during production, used for testing he was in character and functioning correctly (rigging, facial sliders, mesh, and textures) ready for animation. As with the other Boids Of A Feather characters I should really go back and render some nice poses of this late night wise guy...
Below is the default pose shot of Owl after all of his final textures have been added. I usually try to create as much of the mesh as possible before adding any textures so as to get a clear look at the mesh during construction. See the image at the bottom of this page for the Owl without textures.
For those interested, I've left some of the original log notes here that the Boids Of A Feather team shared during the construction of Owl.
[5th March 1999]
Facial pose sliders added. Smart skin added to some bones. Additional material adjustments. Example face poses below using slider setup. Had a quick look at the leg setup but didn't notice anything funny - if needed can someone else take a quick look. -GaryM[3rd March 1999]
Ammended materials and their naming convention (must be unique between models). Initial work on facial pose sliders, but this upload currently holds blank facial poses. Some mesh changes to head. -GaryM[28th February 1999]
Updates to Owl head mesh to bring more into character. Changes/additions to decals/materials. -GaryM[26th February 1999]
Initial materials/eye decal for Owl, quite some work still required. Changes to cp selection for wrist roll and other minor default setup changes (should not break existing actions/cho). Hands IK pose merged into Arms IK-FK as per Mick and Eagle. No facial pose sliders yet. Face/eye mesh needs some work to bring Owl into character. -GaryM[23rd February 1999]
Fixed Owl's leg setup per the Eagle setup that Gary made. -TGF[27th January 1999]
Fixed some broken leg patches and some other minor mesh adjustments. -GaryM[22nd January 1999]
Owl is all setup but is having a some strange foot problems. See if you can fix it for me. Thanks. I'm beat. -TGF[17th January 1999]
Owl model mesh data only, ready for Mick style default skeletal setup. Let me know once it's constrained and I'll add surface textures and start on the facial poses. -GaryM[9th January 1999]
Mesh complete (feet from Max), requiring only minor tweaks. Setup will be same as latest Mick as per ongoing group discussions. No texturing as yet. -GaryM
