Fur and the Process

I have gone through many tutorials and lessons on Blender. Many teach techniques in areas such as modeling, rigging, animation, etc. But at times there are gaps. For me the gap is between modeling something with fur and then what to do with the fur before rigging and animation occurs.

Is there anyone who can suggest the process after you have modeled let’s say a furry creature and getting ready to rig? What needs to be done to the fur to prepare it for movement via a rig? As a part of that, I have a lot of particle systems in my model (fur) that have the option to convert. I have no idea when and why convert should be used and the whole issue of baking. Any suggestions on where to look for a guide from crossing over to rigging from a completed furry creature?

There is almost never a situation where you want to ‘convert’ the fur to mesh.

You do not need to do anything before rigging. The most common stack situation is this (top to bottom)

Top 1) Armature modifier
2) subsurf (1 1, or 2 2) do not mismatch (1 2) view and rendered or hairs will do crazy sh*t. The alternative to subsurf is multiresolution (or nothing for low poly)

  1. Particle (hair) system.

The idea is this: the armature deforms the lowest poly mesh, the subsurf/or multires then smooths out (or adds details to) the deformed mesh. The hairs are then placed on the surface of the deformed and smoothed out mesh.

When you pose the character, in pose mode, you should see the hairs moving properly with the rig/mesh. If your hairs are long enough such that they should bounce, you can enable hair dynamics, and bake them so they sway with the movement of the character.

fur quicktip: you can usually lower the segments down to 2 to 3, this will speed things up. Change the steps value (in two places) to 3 or 4 for better looking fur.

Thanks Photox,

Make perfect sense and seems to be the missing link so many guides don’t mention when build a character with fur and then going through the process of rigging and all.

Thanks again