Griffin

This is one of my personal projects used for my graduation this year, and maybe one of the biggest challenge I had in a long time, creature art wise.
Houdini 20 and its feather system and grooming toolset wasn't available at the time I was doing this project, so I made a lot of research beforehand, as I was very apprehensive of the feather grooming aspect of this work. I fortunately found extremely helpful resources that helped me go through the feather grooming process, so I want to credit Bryan Bentley and his amazing grooming process on the CG Spectrum Youtube channel.
Regarding the individual feather setup on Houdini, I also mixed a few tutorials as I didn't have the necessary skills to make a setup by myself. I especially want to thank Simon Houdini for his Houdini procedural feather tutorial.

There's a total of approximately 20 000 feathers, so once I created all the necessary feathers in Houdini, I baked their high polys onto low poly planes to optimize them.
I spent most of the time on the look-dev and the shading of the feathers, as it was rather difficult to make them behave correctly alltogether.

I then made the fur in Houdini, exported it into Maya, and only used Xgen for the little feline whiskers next to the beak.

I also made a basic rig to be able to make poses out of the whole model. The fur part would correctly follow the rig and animation imported into Houdini, but unfortunately the animated fur would not export, unlike the versions with no animations, so I'll have to dig that in the future.

Overall it was a big challenge but I learned a lot and still had fun as I'm a big ornithology enthusiast.