After procrastinating for far too long, I decided I’ll finally try to work with the hair particles to make fur… Thing is I don’t really have a clue to what I’m doing (which is never a good sign!) I’m trying to make a more softer-cartoony looking character, similar to
I’m aware that the character above has multiple particle systems n use for the various lengths of the fur, however material wise, it has a pretty soft/fluffy look to it, something I would like to try and replicate. This is my attempt before I realize I don’t know what I’m doing.
Ignoring the fact that the head is using a texture and not fur, you can see that there’s some issues with the furs material, the thighs are pretty bright and glossy, while the arm is darker and duller… and overall the fur looks very coarse and grizzly kind of like a bear, but not soft and cuddly like a dog. My node setup is as follows:
Your problem isn’t really the material, it’s the hair geometry itself. The strand width on your character is MUCH thicker than on the example character you posted, which makes it look coarse and wirey. You can fix this in the particle panel, under “Cycles Hair Settings”. Reduce the “root” size or the scale factor(leave “tip” at 0). The problem with this is the thinner fur will be more sparse, so you’ll probably need to increase the number of hairs which can be a pretty big memory footprint after awhile.
Here is the results of the default root size with a standard subdivided level 2 sphere and 1000 hairs with the children enabled and set to interpolated. The one on the left is the original default root size of 1.0 the one on the right is root size set to .2 and as you mentioned most will use multiple layers of various lengths and thicknesses of hairs to fill in the thin areas where you see the skin of the person/creature.
Also once you get to the combing and shaping of the fur then you can fluff the hair as well to give help fill in some areas (however if you are doing an animation then you may want to skip that as it will just fall back to flat during the animation depending on your stiffness settings for the animation) But a still render would be fine using the fluffing of the hairs to get that puffy look with possibly less hairs needed.
Ooooh. Very helpful information! Thank you… So after reducing the root size of the strands, and increasing the strand count by double, and child count by 33.333e3% (was 100, now 150) I have much softer looking fur! Lovely!
Other then fixing the hip line where the fur is crumpled up under the mesh (I think, found out that the deflect emitter property was set to 0 oops.) What else is needed to make the fur more “fur” like?
