Fox

lucasfalcao - check renders of grass from my webpage; I don’t want to be mean but at this point your grass looks ten times worse than fox. My advice is to model about 5 different leaves and spread them on the ground with particles. Don’t use Blender’s particles as strands, they work well for fur but usually look awful when it comes to create grass of any type. At least add them to modelled grass, they will fullfill the space between real models.

Check out the Blending Nature WIP towards the last few pages. I have posted a few test scenes of different types of grass. To match the quality of the fox I would suggest using a particle system using a group of modeled grass blades. I have a tutorial on my website as well as on the Blending Nature WIP for doing that method.

Real pro work on the fox:), been watching this wip progress and I dont want the rest of the scene bring your fox down…it really deserves to shine!

Happy Blending!

andrepazleal, thanks!

rozmiarek, That’s my very first test, and you are right, looks really ugly! I tried create the grass modeling the leaves, but started to increase the render time a lot. So a back to work with the hair and start getting better results, what I’m posting right now. Please tell me what you think, and thanks for the feedback! :slight_smile:

Derek, big thanks! I will see your tutorial!

Here some progress I’ve made on the fur, texturing and shading. And here is the scene I’m working on, I never made any nature scenes before, so I would like to know what you think.

http://i.minus.com/jjik2b5cX2yLs.png

http://i.minus.com/jKEBRYg9eVqdr.png

This is a newbie question…how do you did the texture? With all that details, is something like copied and pasted from reference images with gimp/ps or other technics?

lukas - it’s already looks much much better; I would vary the colour of grass, perhaps add a few longer blades but you are heading right direction! Well done!

About the fox itself - it looks like something happened with a fur inside fox’s ears. I would shorten hair there, it looks a bit too fluffy. And don’t worry about some areas that you may find still not perfect - perhaps sometimes it’s better too correct them during post produstion, controlling each hair in Blender is quite difficult, I know.

mik1190, yes, I projected images (in high resolution) with Texture Paint, using the clone brush. I said before I would record a small tutorial, but I don’t know if it’s necessary, because there is a lot of projection painting tutorials.

I found this tutorial made by David Allen, hope it help, anyway, ask me anything and will explain to you. This is the same thecnique I used in my fox, and I just used Photoshop for small adjustments, like saturation, constrast;

rozmiarek, yeah definitely the grass needs more variations and I’ve been problems with the fur inside the ears, but I still trying to fix that area. :spin:

By the way - did you make that fur with one or several particles systems?

I’m using two particles, one for overall fur and another to create tiny variations. Any suggestions? :smiley:

Updating… Worked more on the fur, used two ramps, one to fake shadow on fur and another to put more color variation at the tip of the fur, I think with this I get a lot more volume on the fur. Also starting testing some poses… Hope you like and tell me what you think. :slight_smile:

http://i.minus.com/ibj6Am8K2IHqyZ.png

Looks great as always. I like the new pose.

lukas - in my works I used 2-3 systems, one more the main fur, one for some variations and the third for tiny fur like on animal’s ears.

About the pose - I suggest looking for one straight from camera view; it looks fine but ortho view creates this weird distortions.

pretty awesome so far, not much to crit, although the grass does look a bit too uniform in color in the last scene you posted.

Thank you for pointing me to that tutorial, it’s working only with blender internal; when switching to cycles seems like there is a bug with uvmaps and textures displayed in viewport…(or it’s me that don’t know how to use correctly?)

Isn’t the fur rather matted? Or is that the way they actually are?

In my experience that usually how they are in the wild, in fact his model looks quite clean compared to some foxes I’ve seen around here.

I`ve really enjoyed reading this thread a seeing your progress. Thank you for that.

I think the rump area and tail could be more foxy. It may just be the pose, but I would say the rump should be thinner and more curved towards the tail. Which in turn should possibly have thicker fur where it joins the body. ?

Id agree with henrymop about the fur. I was throwing an apple at a fox only the other day and his fur didnt look that matted.

In all, as a foxy looking charecter, excellent imo.

Owldude, thank you! :slight_smile:

rozmiarek, yeah looks weird, I was just testing the camera length.

Kemmler, indeed need more color variation.

mik1190, hmm I don’t know what is. I suggest to finish your texture in Blender internal before you render in Cycles.

henrymop, I just follow some references, but apparently, more wild foxes have the fur more matted, because they tend to be more dirty.

afalldorf, I guess this depend of what the fox was doing that day… |o|

iconjunky, I’m glad you liked sir! Yes, I agree with you. I’m still working on getting more interesting shapes. Thanks for the feedback! :slight_smile:

Here is another update… I started putting everything together, separate in render layers and started doing a bit of compositing. I had problems with Defocus node, I don’t know if it’s the scale of scene, but when I setup the fStop to 128 everything is in focus, and when I setup to 127.9 the render looks very out of focus.

http://i.minus.com/jbyCu1H0UDuQBE.png

very impressive. would love to see one with a snow background. Also great to see from start to now too. Thanks for sharing.