Bake Normals and Stylize Fur

This video was highly requested and now I got the chance to record the workflow between Blender and Krita’s powerful brush engine.
There will be other videos in this same series, stay tuned.
Cheers!

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Cool. Gotta check out this video later. :ok_hand:

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Stylizing stuff can branch out in many forms. I’m still exploring other methods to create stylized fur.

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That’s very useful tip for NPR, thanks. I will need more time to check it out completely, but one thing I have issue with is that result is Object space map, meaning it won’t work correctly with Armature (skeletal) animation. Perhaps re-baking the result (shader where the edited map is plugged into Normal) into Tangent space normalmap will fix it

The key takeaway is that Krita’s brush engine with BLENDER brushes (not Blender our application), is the way to go.

Blender (our application) is not effective enough to do smearing.
Maybe someone will take a look at a refactor of the texture paint module and do what’s right.
This is why I wanted to show the power of combining Krita into Blender. It’s as easy as 3 clicks to go front and back to stylize the normal baked map.

Still, a mention of tangent vs object normals would be nice. Not all users know about that or know how to convert between them.
BTW, if you want Blender only solution for fur pattern normals, it will be putting the baked normal texture on a plane, then growing fur (paricle or geonode fur) from it, and styling the fur. The fur should have emissive material with normalmap as color. Then you can render it from top down orthographic camera. Some extra steps will be needed (like cutting the fur that gets across UV islands), but the result should look the most accurate to actual fur

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I agree. This, what you mention, is one of the many solutions to create super-light-weight looking fur textures for in-game characters.
Many years ago I came across FaceRig (Steam. Now, discontinued) and they use the Zdepth buffer to produce fur, reading RGB channels: Density, Height and Transparency. A very smart solution, with a cool trick I have not seen any other application use (in-game).
This is why I mentioned stylizing fur opens up to many different branches. So cool.