Hello. I have a furry model generated from DAZ and I want to take the already made UV maps from the model and generate a seamless fur texture using nodes. I can’t figure out how to actually generate the materials in a way it looks like fur.
I should mention I’m only looking to generate it as an image texture and not making a particle system.
Update Sept 19,
Here is what I used to have (image textures) and what I managed to get on accident. But I want it to look more fur-like.
[Before]
That’s difficult, I’d say. Fur is not a material that is particularly suitable rendering it as a texture. Even less for making a procedural texture for it.
I had limited success with putting hair particles onto a plane and then rendering the normals in top view (to be used as a normal map on the object to texture. Making it seamless can be done with duplicating the plane and arraying it before rendering.
Fur has a directional napping, similar to certain fabrics. So we can’t shade (react to light) that accurately, or even remotely close. At least not currently, maybe in the future we will get a better fabrics texture generator and shader.
If you rotate a piece of velour (has directional nap) 180 degrees, it will change shade (i.e. become darker), and we can’t do that afaik. To my understanding that would require an anisotropic velvet shader.
The effect @CarlG explained is indeed very much prominent. But one can easily retain parts of it, simply by normal-mapping and using a glossy shader. When looking at the fur from the top, at most places the normals are tilted to one side.
Here are some (hopefully insightful) pictures on what my approach can and cannot produce. I would give you also the blend file, but unfortunately it is too large, due to the hair.
Step 1: create an (ugly, badly combed) fur with hair particles
You see that the anisotropic effect is present in both, but with real hair there are more complex occlusion effects happening, which are not caught (like when looking straight along strands, you mostly look into the dark spaces in between the individual hairs).
I have a wolf character, named “Luposian” that I’ve rendered a walk cycle from. He was designed by someone else and then another person gave him realistic fur. All in Blender. I would like to incorporate him into a 3D 3rd-Person Perspective (3PP) game, like Bungie’s Oni… a game I absolutely loved playing.
However, given that UPBGE is a native Blender-based game engine… would it be able to render the same fur that Blender renders, in a game, in realtime?
