Thanks ShilaM I had forgotten about that area. I also found a 6-pole right there that I had missed and that would have given me some trouble later.
I am thinking of adding an armature to pose the cow. But I am not so sure how to rig this properly. The bones are not a problem but the constraints I should use I am not sure of.
Ok, I can’t spot nothing wrong now, you’ve corrected all the weak points.
As for I can see I think your cow is now ready to move on the next stage 
I’m not so experienced in posing and armature so I can’t suggest you the proper way to do that, maybe someone more experienced in this area could help…
Thanks for your help. You have a good eye for details. I am definitely calling the modeling done. I will try some sculpting to make a normal map of the udder but other than that I think it is texture and materials time.
I have decided to give this model away to Blender Newbies members as part of a challenge over at Blender Newbies.
Here is the url if you are interested.
Here is where I am up too. I have come up with a system finally to texture and add fur. I need to tweak the fur a little.
Glad to help you.
I’ve looked at your fur progress, is it “strand” rendered? I’m asking that because your cow seems to need a lot of particles and the “strand” mode rendering could surely help your machine to elaborate the amount of data. But I think the benefits of the raytrace in the fur too give better realism at fur or grass in a rendered scene.
No it is not strand rendered
I have tried the strand render and it looked horrible. I am very new to using particles so I am sure I set something wrong. If I end up with a long shot (whole cow) I will definitely use the strand render but with a closeup it looks far better without it because of raytrace I think.
I am pretty sure that I still do not have the material settings correct on the fur. Also I think that it is too long. If I remember correctly the cows that I have seen had very short hair except at the top of the head,ears and tail end and much finer and thinner on the Udder and chest floor increasing in depth toward the brisket. It was a bit longer on the top of the muzzle increasing in length toward the forehead. I haven’t been near a cow in 25 years so my memory of the hair is a bit fuzzy. I am also not to happy with the strand thickness and shape. I still haven’t gotten used to the strand settings.
What I have done up until now was just to figure out how to do a UV texture and paint it in Gimp (which I am just starting to learn) and see if I could get that to color the hair strands. I wasn’t sure I had the skills with Gimp to pull it off.
Getting close now. I have to do the hoofs and Udder. But I thought it would be fun to put her in a field to see what she will look like when finished.
Please let me know what you think.
The cow itself looks pretty good. But you need lot’s more particles (try the child setting) as the fur on the cow doesn’t look realistic yet. Same goes for the grass.
You also need to make the snout appear more slimy as cows tend to have a very wet snout.
Great work keep it up.
I have been using child particles as in 1000 parents and 200 render children for each part of the body. I have 6 particle systems on the cow alone each with 1000 parent and 100 or 200 children particles. I have 6000 parent and 100 child particles in the grass. If I go much higher blender crashes. So if you have some good settings to share please let me know I am new to this stuff and have been pulling my own hair out trying to find the right settings to use.
As for the wet nose I haven’t any clue how to make it look wet without it looking like metal.
Yes, me too I think it’s horrible, I wonder how the blender team could obtain such a good implementation of it in Big Buck Bunny… but well…
I think your cow is underexposed so the fur seems too dark even if it’s white. It is an issue I’ve met with the grass in “TTSotM” so I’ve added many different lamp and make those exclusively for the objects I wanted to enlight.
For the fur settings: do you used “Tangent Shading” and “Surface Diffuse” for the shaders?
They could help in realism.
Another advise for you is to make the fur longer than that in the image even if you think the lenght you set is more correct for a real cow. It can help in covering part of the “skin” under the fur and make the fur itslef more realistic.
Let me know whether that help!
Could you show your settings of the particle system? Cause 1000 parents with 200 children should give you 200000 particles which seems enough.
Also try to render the grass and the cow separatly and only compose them later together. That way blender doesn’t have to render both at the same time using up less memory.
You could also take a look at the particle settings of bbb to get an idea how they did it. Even if you can’t render it you should still be able to view it.
I think I have solved my fur problem. It was due to the scale of the mesh. I scaled everything up quite a bit and this is what it looks like.
I am calling this one finished. I have reached the extent of my abilities in Blender. I took this on for a fun way to learn. I have accomplished everything I set out to do. I know it isn’t perfect but my skills can take this no farther. There is so much I still have to learn about particles, lighting, texturing and Gimp. I think a new project will keep up my enthusiasm to continue to learn. So here are the final renders.
Even though you do not want to continue…
if you do you might want to create a specular map which is pretty much white on the snout and a darker grey or even black on the rest of the body. Map that to spec and the snout should look wetter then the rest.
The snout has two specular maps one for soft specular and another for hard specular. It uses a modified form of the SSS multilayer skin shader that I learned from Pixelvore and Maqs. If I add to much specular it does not look wet just shiny and odd. I would most likely handle that in post processing in Gimp but I haven’t finished learning Gimp yet. I wasn’t after photo realism just a good model and decent materials.
really interesting results, Jimtuv. I like your cow.
If you don’t mind to rerender your images, I suggest to enhance lights and contrast to reach a greater quality level without having to trick much.
Very nice! good job.
I want to sign in the blendernewbies forums, it seems a good place to learn and I’d like to download your mesh and have a look at that by myself.
They are wonderful over there. It is a great place for anyone to learn or develop new techniques and ask questions without fear of being put down for ignorance. Everyone is very helpful and supportive.
The mesh is in this link
Finish the Cow
I made a challenge out of finishing it to give others something to learn UV texturing and particles on.
