How to Create Hair and Feathers for an Owl Harpy Character

Introduction

Hello! My name is Eugenia Zanina, and I'm a 3D Character Artist for games. I'd like to share a breakdown of my game character project, Owl Harpy, created in Unreal Engine. I've been working in 3D for four years. I know that's a relatively short time, and honestly, I feel a bit out of place talking about my work since I still have so much to learn.

So I'd like this breakdown to be less of a tutorial and more of a reminder that learning can be tough, and every project on ArtStation involves hours of work. I'd be glad if this breakdown inspires someone and gives them the strength to keep learning and improving. For me, this project was the culmination of a very long journey.
 
As for my background, I started as a self-taught 2D Artist — small illustration commissions, then work in mobile game development. I began learning 3D out of curiosity, took a few courses, and found a job right after. Among artists at my level, I was recognized for my artistic approach and ability to create beautiful work. But as a naturally creative person, the technical side was challenging for me.

Simple techniques like retopology, baking, or lighting setup came easily and improved over time, but creating game-ready hair was an insurmountable obstacle. The complexity and scope of the task always scared me, yet I kept trying to achieve it.

Owl Harpy

Before this project, I attempted to create hair using the game-ready pipeline three times, and each time I failed. First, I didn't understand the technology well enough. Then, I lacked proficiency in the required software. During my last attempt, I couldn't set up the shader in the engine where the hair would be used. Each failure shook my confidence, and I kept delaying this task.
 
Finally, I decided to figure out the game-ready hair pipeline once and for all. Before starting, I set the following criteria for myself:

• The character should be simple but complete, so I could work on cards as part of the model.
• It should include all hair types commonly found in average characters — hair, fur, and feathers — so I could understand the differences in their creation.
• I'd focus mainly on hair, not modeling, but the final result should still look beautiful and polished.
• I wouldn't limit myself by poly count — I lacked the experience to determine the required poly count for this kind of work.
   

I chose Betty Jiang's Owl Harpy illustration as my reference. It met all my criteria and, more importantly, inspired me significantly. For personal portfolio work, inspiration is crucial because there are no external motivators to complete it.

References

I started by gathering additional references. The original artwork is an illustration, so it doesn't provide exhaustive information about how the model should look. On one hand, this gives some freedom, but on the other hand, matching the character, proportions, and details becomes nearly impossible since games require models in standard A-pose or T-pose.

However, matching the reference was secondary for me. My main goal was to create realistic hair, feathers, and fur. So I collected references primarily to understand how similar things look in reality.

The second important step was to create a plan. I've made enough models to understand that the rule "look before you leap" applies to 3D as well. Unplanned steps often complicate work, force you to return to previous stages, or require redoing everything.

So I thought ahead about how to distribute materials on the model to make shader setup easier. Since I needed a large number of cards of different types — for hair and body — I divided them into two UV maps and created layouts based on the reference deconstruction.

Modeling, Retopology, and Texturing

I won't go deeply into the modeling breakdown for the body and head, as it was a fairly standard process. I didn't use any unique techniques — I manually modeled everything with slight use of alphas for texture. Initially, I planned to leave part of the body uncovered by fur, but later decided against it.
 
For the base, I manually created a standard animation retopology in Maya. There, I also unwrapped and laid out the UVs using three 2K tile sets — one for the head and eyes, another for the body, and a third for the upper wing part. Since I mainly work on characters, my UV shells often have various shapes, and automatic layout doesn't handle them well. So for organic objects, I manually lay out the shells as densely as possible. This also allows me to decide whether to increase or decrease certain parts without losing visible quality.
 
I also started working on body textures using the PBR pipeline with Substance 3D Painter. Textures are always a lengthy process, especially when the character will be used in a game engine, and I kept adjusting and fixing textures throughout the entire work. Since I wanted to focus on hair, I decided not to use MetaHuman technologies — that's my next learning step. To master this work, I needed to focus on one complex thing at a time. So the body textures in this project are fairly standard.

The Hair and Feathers

Once the basic (and relatively simple) part was done, I moved on to the most challenging part. I created hair and feathers using the XGen plugin in Maya. I know there are specialized programs for creating realistic feathers, but my goal was to learn the plugin well enough to recreate any form needed.
 
I started with feathers, as I already had experience creating hair cards, but feathers were a completely new task for me. As it turned out, there's no big difference in working on something other than hair if you understand the object's structure. Usually, hair guides are created on horizontal surfaces so strands are vertical — roots at the top, ends at the bottom. Feather filaments are positioned along the shaft on both sides, so I created two vertical planes along which I generated hair guides.

I saved a lot of time by finding detailed references for all feather types beforehand, as they vary significantly in appearance depending on their location on the wings and body. Working with guides helped me create the necessary feather shapes. Unlike hair, feathers have a very specific form, and using procedural modifiers alone isn't sufficient — you need to strictly control the process.

So deforming each individual guide using a regular pivot allowed me to create complex, unique shapes for each feather, while modifiers added variety and "texture" — some I left stiff, others made softer and fluffier. An important detail was adding a bend along the shaft so they would look volumetric on a flat plane in the future.

After mastering XGen on feathers, creating hair was relatively simple. The character has long hair, so I had to carefully control hair thickness. Since both long and short strands are on the same UV, they need different thicknesses depending on the expected size of each strand. In my case, the long wavy strands were several times larger than the short fur, so their thickness on the UV should be smaller. Otherwise, when scaling up the cards, they'd become too thick and unrealistic instead of matching the fur.

I baked the Texture maps for hair and feathers in Maya using Arnold Render. I created many different maps since I wasn't sure which ones I'd need for shader setup in Unreal Engine, where I planned to do the final render. I'll show the list of maps I actually needed later.
 
Once the cards were ready, I moved on to the most difficult stage — creating the shader. The issue is that I'm a beginner in Unreal Engine. As a 3D Character Artist, I've created fairly simple shaders for PBR textures, sometimes adding transparency, Subsurface Scattering, glow, or editing Colors, Roughness, and Metallic parameters.

From my experience, I've seen several hair shaders, and they always looked very complex, so I was scared to approach this stage. But luckily, the 3D community is friendly and responsive. My friend, a Grooming Artist, recommended an excellent video showing the step-by-step creation of a cool shader, where the author explained what each node was for. It took time, but I successfully created my modified shader based on the video example because the original didn't work well for feathers.

All feathers were different colors, some with patterns. Plus, I placed two feather varieties on the same UV sheet: stiff and shiny for the outer wing side, and soft and fluffy for the inner wing side and body. The same Specular and Roughness parameter settings didn't give the desired effect, so I used masks and additional nodes to output two sets of parameters for different feather types and adjust them separately. Instead of a specific color value, I used a manually created map in Photoshop and used Unreal Engine nodes to adjust hue and saturation.
 
Overall, I was satisfied, but I noticed one detail in the reference: some feathers had different colors on each side. It was a minor detail, but I considered it a sign to learn more (and once I saw it, I couldn't get it out of my head). I used the TwoSidedSign node and a modified Color map to assign a different color to part of the feathers on the back side.

The final list of Texture maps you can see below:

Then I started placing feathers and hair strands on the model using the GS Curve tool. It's simple and intuitive but very effective. For example, I could quickly and easily create a "bunch" from the braid on the character's head by assigning a curve to the entire braid instead of individual cards. I did the same with the curled locks near the face — created one from different cards, then assigned a curve to the entire lock.

Card placement is more of an artistic process than a technical one, so this stage was very enjoyable for me. It was also the final step before rendering, and the model finally appeared in its final form. By the end, I realized that a model requiring extensive grooming is challenging not only technically but also emotionally — it consists of several objects created separately, and you can only see how they work together at the very end. So experience and planning are critically important in such work.
 
Speaking of the scene setup stage, I can't say the model was ready yet. While adjusting lighting, rendering, and post-processing, I constantly fixed, changed, and improved things. I kept tweaking parameters until the very end, and material instances and well-structured parameter sets were incredibly helpful for this.

Lighting

For rendering, I used Unreal Engine 5.5. As a base for setup, I used the MetaHuman Lighting scene. Honestly, it's quite difficult to recall all the settings I tried and precisely say what I decided to keep and what I discarded. I also used different lighting scenarios for different renders — artistic lighting for demonstration frames creating the right atmosphere, and a calmer, studio setup for details.
 
I tried to follow the standard three-light scheme: key light, fill light, and rim light. But in my opinion, you shouldn't limit yourself when creating a beautiful render. If I need additional light to highlight a detail or get an expressive reflection or highlight, I use it. For example, here's one of the scenes:

Conclusion

I always try to emphasize things that are special to me with lighting and hide mistakes and unsuccessful moments so they don't catch the eye. A bit of bloom, chromatic aberration, and sharpening always make the image better — just don't overdo it. After all, the main thing is the work done on modeling and texturing, not post-processing effects.
 
That's it! I hope this breakdown inspires you to try and create something beautiful!

Eugenia Zanina, 2D/3D Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins