3D Feather made with Blender

When I was walking in the forest, I came across several feathers. Inspired by their beauty, I wanted to challenge myself to create these feathers as realistically as possible in Blender. To begin with, I’ve first looked how others made feathers in Blender, but the results were not that satisfying. Therefore, I figured I had to experiment until I got the result I was looking for.

How I made this 3D feather with Blender

In order to make this 3D Feather, I had to split the feather in parts that were going to be modeled separately. Those were the Shaft and Quill, the Vane and the After Feather / Downy Barbs.

The Vane of the feather was a small challenge, which is made through Photometric Stereo Scanning, a simpler type of Photogrammetry. Just like Photogrammetry, Photometric Stereo Scanning is also done with Cross Polarization photography.

With this technique, I captured the Albedo, Translucency and Normal map. Then, I generated all other maps through Affinity Photo and Materialize. The textures are approximately 4K (4186 x 2757px), so they are suitable for extreme close-up renders of this feather.

After creating all the textures, it was time to do the modeling. The vane of the feather is a simple subdivided plane which got shaped to the form of the feather I found in the forest. On the other hand, the shaft and quill of the feather is modeled with a subdivided cylinder, nothing fancy.

The final touch was the After Feather / Downy Barbs, that was the real challenge for me. I knew I could achieve this with Blender’s Geometry Nodes. But since I’m not a Geometry Nodes Wizard / Geek, I had some rough times getting these After Feather / Downy Barbs right. But I got it working and it’s procedural! All you have to do is draw the After Feather with some curves.

In the end, I’ve made a pretty decent looking feather I think. I hope you enjoyed reading about my process and learned something new.

For those interest, I’ve made this 3D feather available in my Asset Library as a Premium Asset.