djthed
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Flying Rainbow Dash Version 2
🕑 Added 2019-03-18 19:15:27 +0000 UTCHere's the old Version 1:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/flying-rainbow-25342829
I uploaded Version 1 knowing that the wings weren't completely ideal. But considering how long I've been sitting on this wing project, I figured that I'd upload it as it was and hopefully seek some outside perspective on what could be changed, as I've been staring at those wings for months and I've just gotten used to them the way the were. Maybe it would be cleaner to not upload flawed renders knowingly for general audience retention or whatever, but I feel like uploading now and seeking outside perspective was more important to the quality of the model in the long term. And thanks to all the feedback I got, especially from the DeviantArt user Ihmislehma who gave very detailed feedback in the comments section from the previous version on DeviantArt for the wings, I'm now very, very happy with how these wings look AND function now.
Version 1: 
Version 2: 
The biggest change is to the leading edge feathers, also known as the minor coverts I believe. I knew that would be the biggest issue people would have with the wings upon uploading Version 1, as that was the part I least understood about wing anatomy until recently. But thanks to the feedback I was given, I have a better understand of what I needed to do for those part of the wings. The new minor coverts are fundamentally much more simple than the old ones, as all the feathers on each layer are all connected into one mesh, rather than the minor covert being all separated into individual feather meshes, which was a pain to properly rig.
The next most notable change is the overall feather layout for the rest of the feathers being adjusted. Not much else to say about them other than they just look better and feel more like wings than before.
And despite all of those changes, the wing rigging I've set up from before functions basically the exact same, as I only needed to make minor adjustments to it to accommodate the new feather layout. The wings still fold properly, they just look better now.
Here's a little bonus. It's an HDRI rotation to show off how the materials from the model as a whole reacts to light from all angles. I did this to more finely tune the transparency settings of the wings, but I thought I'd make this public as well:
