Blender Fur Breakthrough - not perfect yet, but can be soon!

Artwork Works in Progress
1

OK, even though it is my exams, I still sit down every so often and play with Blender for a bit of relaxation… whilst messing around, I decided to try and simulate fur… The aim was to just make static fur - non-animatable… After trying the fiber script, and beast, and getting OK results, i decided to take an alternative approach.

I tried to produce the fur using blender’s internal materials editor, and I achieved success to some extent. I looked at the Halo button, and tried a few settings with that and applied it to an object. The results are below:

http://www.khullarfamily.com/liquid/outputs/fur_test.jpg

I know it is not perfect, but I find this quite interesting, that such a powerful and developable (if that’s even a word) feature has been discovered. I say discovered, as I have never seen it before. If this is old news, sorry, ignore this post.

Basically, with this, we have the ability to assign an actual fur material to an object and render it, hence making life much easier for us all - but unfortunately with no animation. The bright spots in the middle (basically where the verticies are), should be easy to remove, with a bit of coding in the main Blender source - i cant see this as being a major problem.

The render times aren’t too bad - this was produced in 3.5 minutes with full AA and gaussian blurring. Tiny, compared with Maya, Lightwave (shave and haircut) and certain 3dsmax plugins.

I think this could be a good method in the making!

By the way, the fibres ARE multidimensional - so the hair moves outward in all three dimensions, not just two.

What do you think? is it a feature worth developing in blender? if any coders have any ideas on developing this, post them here - any help would be great!

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Wow! Amazing results! The fur on the edges looks so realistic I can’t even believe it. I mean, it’s in cones and all, like real fur… amazing.

You gotta work on it, and everyone has to! This could be huge!

I am making one of my characters that requires fur. I haven’t tried Beast yet, since I was busy with WC, but I am going to try it in few hours and see how it goes.

If you’ll get this to be looking good (without bright spots), this could be a great way to make fur.

Great job man!

~Blade

P.S. Could you explain step by step how you got this result? If that’s not too much to ask… :wink:

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hi again,
thanks for the comment blade. I will be explaining how it was done soon - i am currently revising for exams, so taking time out to show the process is a little difficult ATM.

My exams will be finished by friday afternoon, GMT, so I will have time then, hopefully to work through the steps.

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Rodger that! Hey, I would wish you “good luck”, but some of us Russians believe that it’s “unlucky” if someone tells you that (I know… how lame). So I’ll just say this… You can nail em! :stuck_out_tongue:

~Blade

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Meh, it looks ok on a sphere i suppose, but the real challenge would be actually applying it. (Just like env. maps, anyone can do this on a sphere but to actually make use of it is much more difficult.)

I wouldnt say this is a breakthrough or that this would even be better than beast or fiber, as those methods yeild shadows.

If you can find a way to actually apply this to something that is relelvent, I would be much more interested in the technique.

dante

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True on shadow part… but what fascinated me in this technique is the fur stracture. I mean, in fiber or beast (well, beast is better in this area than fiber) have a problem with looking real for a reason that they don’t go into small cone-like groups. I mean, if you look at a real fur, it’s not all uniform… same with this technique. Beast is good at this, but it’s 2d… isn’t it? Or I could be wrong. I can’t really remember, but I’ve been following Beast for a while back when it started out, and they used card method…

Maybe if the coders will make it so that particles/halos would be able to cast shadows (like an option you would be able to turn on), then this would be much cooler.

~Blade

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If its just a bunch of halos, wont they rotate with the camera?

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points taken… i know about the problem with shadows, and as for the movement of the camera, i have already said, this is not for animation. But i will still try and see if i can see this through to something more successful

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Look at the bottom of this page:

http://www.stormpages.com/eeshlo/otherBlender.html

%<

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:o Awesome, that cube fur, really awesome. I wish that guy told us how to makes such animated fur on a cube. I think many people would defently want to know how to make such animated fur. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think he did:

An example of how to create furry objects based on Jed Lengyel’s “Real-Time Fur over Arbitrary Surfaces”, although it uses only the ‘outer shell’ part of it, so a lot of things can be done to improve it. As it is done here, it is certainly not anywhere near realtime!
For more info see Jed Lengyel’s site . It is a similar principle to the fake volumetric light trick above.
To make things a bit easier there is a small python script included to create the fur layers.
blend file(zip)

For some reason nothing works on his website… I can’t see any images… Links don’t work… hmm… bad…

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There’s a .blend for the bunny with a long explanation in the text window.

%<

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Ehh… could someone host that .blend… I can’t dl anything from his website… I can’t even see images.

~Blade

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I got the page but all the pics and links were dead.

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Works fine for me, shaded partical might be good for fur, make sure you turn on vertex.

Can automatic Volumetric light be coded into Blender as well ?

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Some folks wrote:

I got the page but all the pics and links were dead.

I don’t have webspace but I’ll send it to anyone who wants to host it.

%<

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ok, i dont give up, but i think the development for the time being is over because a much more effective way of generating the fur has been found - multi - layering objects. The results are great too. The render times are a bit slower, but still, the method works and yields worthwhile results.

Oh well, I tried! %|

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Dosent reallly seem that impressive compared to this:

https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26114&highlight=hair

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If you still need someone to host it, you can go to ftp://jeeves.50free.net, username is com_jeeves.50free.net, password is blendcom, and upload it there. Everything uploaded will be at http://jeeves.50free.net/blender/com/whatever.bleh

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this is the first time I’m seeing this fur stuff fligh % really neat!