What do you do with more time? Re feather your chicken!

After getting some feedback from people, and looking at the chicken in some of our renders, we decided that the chicken needs an overhaul. We've got a bit of extra time on this project now, so why not make more work for ourselves, right?

In this image, you can see we've split the chicken into three feather zones:

There is a zone for short feathers, one for medium feathers, and one for longer feathers.

The short feathers, or pin feathers, hug the body closely and are pretty tightly packed. They are mostly around the head and neck area. In our placement drawing, these feathers are red. On a real bird, they look like this:

The medium feathers, or downy feathers, are mostly on the underbelly of the chicken. It's possible that you rest your head on a bag of these at night. On a real chicken, the breast isn't too fluffy, but hey, this is animation! In our placement drawing, these feathers are orange. Here's what downy type feathers look like on a real bird (check out those legs!):

Finally, we get to the longer or larger feathers. These are what cover most of the body of the bird. They aren't really flight feathers, but they're pretty close in length to those. In our placement drawing, these feathers are green. On a real bird, they look like this:

So there you have it. A complete overhaul has begun. Look for the results soon.