Okay, I’m fully admitting defeat here. I have been trying to add fur to my character meshes in Blender but I for the life of me cannot do it. Using hair particles slows my potato PC to a crawl and it always looks awkward while geometry nodes have done nothing but confuse me immensely. I try using the asset library to add hair onto a mesh but it either doesn’t work and there’s no good explanation as to how mesh to hair even works. I’ve tried to understand it and I simply cannot comprehend it and my computer probably can’t handle it anyway. Is there a way to make fur-like textures or faux-fur meshes without using particle systems or geometry nodes?
And if there’s not, is there at least a cheap way to give the illusion of fur growing/sprouting using shaders?
Okay but I’m still totally lost on where the hair even comes from.
How do you even put geometry nodes onto rigged figures? Every time I try it either makes the mesh vanish or it comes out wrong. Why can’t I just have hair particles growing from the mesh?
The easiest way if you want fur to grow from the whole mesh is to go to object menu - quick effects - quick fur.
That will set up all the basic nodes for you and you just need to tweak the parameters.
You can use weight paint to control density.
Also you can select the fur and go into sculpt mode and you get special brushes to edit the guide hairs (the ones highlighted) the rest are interpolated with the nodes. It is similar to the old particle edit mode. You can add and delete guide hairs and brush them.
Set the density in the “interpolate hair curves” node down to a setting that is manageable for you for combing (you can turn it up again once you finish editing.) The more interpolated hair you see the slower combing will be.
I used weight paint to keep the fur out of the eyes, but also had to delete a couple of guides.
The fur should follow the mesh around in animation.
The video I linked in the last post is for a more complex setup that separates the hair into different parts. This is a good method if you use a lot of fur because you can separate different parts and also hide areas so that combing is more responsive.
I’m thinking for what I’m making I’m just not going to bother with fur for this project since it’s already so huge and runs like crap.
I did find a way to make a procedural texture that resembles fur so I’ll give that a try - I tend to use a lot of visual cheats/illusions in my work anyway.
