leather-guy opened this issue on Mar 07, 2005 ยท 90 posts
hauksdottir posted Tue, 08 March 2005 at 6:38 PM
Well, there is this funny thing about feather bird wings. They evolved. Efficient wings kept the bird owning them alive long enough to eat, meet, and breed. Some of the wings are tubby (I still don't know how a duck gets aloft!), some are sleek. But they all share certain strong similarities due to function. Long tips at the end are good for turning using minimal energy. Scoopy feathers near the body are good for landing without falling on one's nose (ever watch a jet land?). Just as all birds are related, their wings are related, too. Any designer working from real bird wings is going to ceate something similar in overall shape, number of bands of small feathers, number of long wing tip feathers. 6 pointy feathers here and 6 pointy feathers there won't convince me if an eagle happens to have 6 pointy feathers. Some places to check would be the modeling of the individual feathers (virus's and dagmath's examples look awfully similar) and if/how the wings are joined to a central embedded "body". A short-cutter might take pains to modify something visible, but be careless about something out of sight. Carolly