It's been merely two months since I pivoted from digital drawings (some of which I shared with this community) to a hyperfocused tinkering with 3D modeling in Blender (mostly designing a CharMorph humanoid model, changing it extensively while also sculpting and adding assets such as wings and dress), and this is my first successful sculpting of an entire new character, as well as my first successful rigging that didn't rely on CharMorph or similar ready-to-use character libraries (other than Rigify and its Bird metarig for the armature, which I had to modify in order for it to match the sculpture).
I was missing a (preferably free) owl model for my esoteric scenes (the owl is meant to be alongside the aforementioned humanoid model in my scenes), and every free model I could find available online didn't seemed fitting for the kind of symbology I'm working with; other owl models, perhaps slightly better fitting to the specific symbology I was seeking, were paywalled models, so I ended up throwing it all up and trying to do it myself (which I intend to release publicly as a CC0 project).
As a trivia, I started with the idea of sculpting a Great Horned Eagle-Owl (Bubo virginianus), but I ended up pivoting to a Megascops (specifically, this one who was one of my main visual inspirations), as Screech-owls felt somewhat easier for me to sculpt than eagle-owls. Well, even though a Bubo would be better to my scenes, it still fits the symbolism.
Another trivia: notice her eye pupils, they can dilate (morphable via Shape Keying; because both eyes share the same mesh, changing the morph will affect both eyes, although in real owls the pupils can dilate differently across both eyes depending on whether there are direct light shining onto one of them).
There's a lot I still feel I need to improve, especially the texture (my detail-oriented side looks at this result and can't help but notice the bizarre similarity with a racoon or possum, given the way I painted the face texture), the UV map (there are some seams due to my specific parameters for Smart UV Unwrapping; my potato laptop can do 4096px textures, but I try to make it easier for it and stick with textures up to 2048px, downscaling to 1024px when I feel it's too heavy to work with, but this leads to pixel seams), as well as additional rigging bones for the metarig (especially the eyelids, as IRL owls can and do blink).
Suggestions are welcome!
(without the VHS effect)
