Hello !
I am working on a small animation project (very, very amateur) right now, and I need some advices.
Almost all of my characters were supposed to have fur, but recently I have questioned this choice.
If I choose to render without fur, I save time for rendering (even if I go through a renderfarm), but this implies that the characters’ appearance changes a lot, especially since without fur, they have a very simple texture.
I am showing you here some renderings, some with hair, others without. Please let me know what you think: do you think it’s worth leaving the fur or not?
Thank you in advance and have a good day! !
Animation starts are best when showing and telling a story line… hair or no hair at the start of trying to get attention sounds silly. Look at seasoned animators… stick figure storyboards with captions and maybe a short test of the story line. And character presentations.
Your characters need work fur or not. The need more character. They look dull. Loosen up.
You decide render time and method, most people know it takes time. Fur or no fur at render isn’t a question to ask. You can go more anime with flowing stylized fur and make it great.
Thank you for your opinion!
I hadn’t seen it that way.
I’m afraid it’s a little too late to completely change the design of all the characters, but I can still work on the textures.
First of all: hats off for working on an animation! From my own attempts I know what a pile of work this is, even for a small animation.
bachnoral is right, when saying that the most important part of an animation is a good story. It almost doesn’t matter which visual style you choose to tell the story.
The characters do look a bit low poly and i can see shading artifacts (like sharp edges). Most probably due to errors in the geometry.
Keep us updated. I will follow your progress with interest.
Try a ‘Smooth’ or ‘Sub-Division’ modifier on the characters to reduce the ‘low poly’ look mentioned. Increase you poly count one step, and use ‘Relax Vertices’ on select areas, without loosing detail. Good texturing can look passable if some displacement is included. Key point, story development always should be first.
I would equally-well enjoy a well-donestory using either approach. If the story is compelling, I’m not going to be noticing the fur.
After all, in the finale scene of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, this guy freely admits that he was crying his eyes out … and there wasn’t a scrap of CG-anything present. If you decide to omit the fur entirely, “it’s still animation.” Your actual challenge, therefore, is simply this: "make a grown guycryabout your characters."
Thank you very much for all your feedback!
It’s really going to help me. Even if it’s a little late now to improve my story, the whole design, etc., I’ll keep that in mind for my future projects.
Hey there Lympha,
I too am making a… thing that has fury characters without any fur
I too initially had the characters with fur, but then it proven to be too much trouble (memory, shading, fur animation, time, etc.) and decided to abandon it completely. With fur does look better, but in the end we need to thing first in the big picture and actually get the project done.
What has proven to work, for me, is model some fur stands, not everywhere, but here and there (3 to 6 should be enough).
You can give a look to the characters in here, may serve you as inspiration.
What I did was:
1- Select two planes from the base geometry, where you want the fur strands, make an extrude;
2- Now select just one face and do a new extrude again followed from Scale-> 0 to make a point.
3- Select the other face, make an Extrude and again Scale → 0
4- Adjust to make it look more furry
By what I see you’re already doing a great job! Keep it up!