Hi guys, hope you can help us with this challenge.

So we are using the H20 Feather System to create a duck. And we would like to use textures sampled from a Feather Atlas texture.

Each feather is correctly picking up the UV's sampled from the atlas and they also render correctly with a shader that uses the atlas as the color texture.

The issue starts to arise when we want to blend feather together.

We are using the templatenames and templateweights array method to paint in regions where certain feathers need to go and then blend the transitions by just blurring the weights. The color data on the barbs is correctly displaying this blending.

Now applying the same shader we used on the single feathers to the full feather groom we get incorrect color blending results.

I'm assuming we are missing something in the shader to take the template weights, but I'm not sure what. Right now feathers in the blended zones get either the first feather texture or the second feather texture applied, but there's not soft transition from one to the other. Using "Interpolate UVs" on the Feather Interpolate node doesn't seem to help either.

Any ideas what we might be missing? We're using LOPS, The Houdini Feather Procedural and Arnold.

Rendering with the barb point colors works, but it's not high enough resolution for what we need and increasing the point count / barb segments would be detrimental to overall performance.

Any suggestions are appreciated.