I’m searching for best method to create a realistic fur texture on a character and it’s pretty tough.
I thought about creating fur with the hair system then baking it, and did some experiments.
I got a method of converting fur to mesh with geometry nodes, so it can be baked.
It’s slow, on top of handling the fur particles, there’s also converting them to mesh part
Too many hairs and it will not bake
Result is very aliased, especially with many small hairs
No realistic look of Hair BSDF material
I’ve seen before people baked fur with turning the furred mesh into UV islands and rendering them with camera directly. This method is also imperfect, it ends up with seams and it’s not clear how normal map would be created from it.
I’m stuck at the moment. Is there a possible method to it? Maybe it would be possible to make with geonodes some UV seam correction, no idea how to do this, definitely hard to figure out if possible at all.
Do you really need to match a highpoly mesh, or you’re more into finding ways to have lowpoly fur ?
What I mean by that is that maybe you shouldn’t try to bake hairs, but more to find ways to fake the hairs, either with some textures, cards or a mix of both…
I did painting hair with textures and also made a procedural material for fur.
My goal here is to find more streamlined method where I could make good looking for with Blender’s hair, in that way I’d have more control over shapes, clumps, directions, colors, etc.
Painting hair in Substance doesn’t give me that much control, even though I made a Substance procedural graph, there are still limitations and lack of complete fine control that 3D hair system gives me.
Yeah, I think this is worthwhile. For LODs, for a base texture that hair cards get placed on, for lower-power hardware that can’t render thousands of hair cards…
I really hope you figure this out before I have to do a furry animal again
