I used the particle system (hair) to do this. Sadly, the render in the viewport looks way better than the final render. Don’t know why, because the viewport render looks way more realistic. But still, even if the final render was as good, there are major flaws:
I already integrated two vertex groups with different particle systems. short and longer hair. But as it is not possible to select symmetrical, it is a tedious work to mark all the vertices along the body or change it. on top the transition doesn’t look smooth enough and I don’t know if they add on top of each other on some places producing more render time. any better solution?
like I said, viewport render looks much more “hairy”.
-If I try to work on them with the comp (to make the fur going more backwards like in the reference (https://battleforge.fandom.com/wiki/Card:Forest_Elder), my computer is on his limits and after that: I can’t alter the made adjustments in the particle panel without undoing the changes made in particle edit mode. seems counter intuitive.
I’d say one issue to address first, is that there seem to be few path steps. That might even be an issue about the difference between viewport and final render. For final the number of steps is Render->Path-Steps, while for viewport it is Viewport Display->Strand steps.
Thank you very much for your response.
Sadly, the path step increase to 7 didn’t brought big changes. It looks slightly smoother, but the overall shape is still looking like totally different from the viewport render…
Maybe I will change the particle system to hair planes anyway, I need much more performance and I heard it is the way to go actually in the industry.
Well, yes, performance certainly is an issue with fur.
One thing that comes to mind is subdivision. Do you have different subdivision levels of your mesh for viewport and render? If yes, it will mess edited particle systems up.
No, I got no subdivision modifier on any object. No modifier atm to be clear.
(BTW if I use subsurf, my blender 2.8 crashes. no problems in 2.7.
But I don’t need it right now luckily.)
Yeah maybe I can realize the look better with hair planes and alpha texture. But I am afraid it won’t look as realistic as the viewpoint render. Or at least only with a lot more work…
Yes, particle hair look really cool, when one can afford the resource usage.
It must be possible to figure out, what’s wrong with the final render. There aren’t that many settings which can make a difference. What happens when you disable children? Do the parent hairs alone look the same in viewport vs. final?
for the vertex groups, you can weight paint. just create a new vertex group and then go to weight paint mode. there is a bunch of options like mirror the stroke, or draw gradients.
for the transition, spend a little more time on particle edit mode, there is a lot of options there too, like length (add and subtract). so you mess around a bit and try to get a smooth length falloff.
there is probably an issue with the fur clumping/parting, under the “children” panel, as it is the only way to modify hair after you’ve finished editing. from the reference, it looks like the fur is longer and softer, so maybe it needs a little more “puff” on the hair edit. try to keep the changes at a very minimum on the parting/clumping settings, and experiment around with the children particles amount on viewport/render.
Hello! To me, it looks like your viewport render has way less particles than the final render, as it should be with the default settings, that’s why the final render hair looks solid. If you don’t want to adjust any other parameter, just decrease the number of children particles for the final render matching the viewport amount and they will look the same. To make it look even better, I would decrease the render particles a bit (just a bit, not as the viewport particles) and make it thinner. Try to use the principled hair shader for softer fur-like hair instead of wires. Hope it helps.
seems counter intuitive.
