Fur:
Initial tests:
I started testing hair in a simple shape to understand the control methods for hair and how to gain the desired shape and volume for my hair. I need hair which covers the entire body and a longer patch going from the base of the head to the underbelly.
I used the squirrel hair preset and using the paint affect brushed the hair in various directions. In maya the number of hair follicles is lower than what renders out. I worked with about 60- 100 hairs for every U and V point on the UV of the mesh.
There I was experimenting with a ramp shader on the length control to change the length along the mesh. By changing the offsets one could go from a fairly even fur length to having parts which are very shot to very long. This is basically created by using a gradient of black to white mapped on the mesh which can then be changed to control the value of the gradient.
Deer tests:
I then moved my test to the base deer mesh which required far more control then the mesh above. Again I used the squirrel preset and used the inclination, polar and role settings to get the fur to follow the shape of the body. The render versions show how the fur isn't distributed every throughout the mesh. This is because the fur uses the UV not the mesh to form it's shape.
The current UV has a very small area dedicated to the head part of the mesh which mean that less hair is distributed there, hence the bald patches, and meant that I had a hard time mapping the length around the eyes and nose which is key otherwise the entire head will be coved in fur.
This was a little experiment to try and achieve the main of the deer. I was playing around with the length and the scraggle. This could be controlled by painting directly onto the deer using the Fur Paint tool (show below) the white indicating a longer length.
New UVs:
To achieve higher control on the face area I created a second UV map for the mesh detaching the head, re doing the UV so that I would have higher control on the fur folicles produced in that area.
In the end I used tow different fur systems, one to create the main fur which covers the entire body ( I liked the squirrel present so I used that as a base to work form) and a second for the chest main (for using the lion preset).
Below are screen shots for the different length maps for the different fur systems. The first is the lion- chest fur. The white signalling the longer hair and the black indicating no hair. The second is of the squirrle- body fur. This is very even distribution so is one colour but noise can be added either using a noise map or changing the settings provided.
Fur Colour and Pattern:
To colour the fur and give it the patterns whcih featured in the desings and concepts I paintned the deer in Mudbox using the fur UV map. This was then aplied to the base and tip colour so giving the fur full colour.
This render was done on production mode taking 20 minutes for one frame. Although it produced the best results I unfortunately did not have the time to render out a full turntable at this quality.
Trouble shooting: Antler UVs
When I went to texture the antlers using a reapeting texture tile the texture was streached horrible which can be seen in the screen shot below with a checkerd texture. This ment that the UVs wheren't proportional to the mesh and had to be redone.
To do this I kept the checkered texture and re did the UVs for the antlers so that the chesks distortion was brought down to the minimum and that the cherker size was consistent throughout all the antlers. The end result was better that belfore howere the mesh themselfves were badly made with uneven topology. Given the deadline I do not have time to remodle the antlers but if this project is to be taken forward they will need to be remade.
No comments:
Post a Comment