I need help understanding how to create good fur

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
#1

badfur1
badfur1.jpg1280×720 172 KB

That sadly is the best that I can do with fur in Blender. I see people doing all sorts of cool looking fur within blender but I can’t get it to look good. ALways looks like straws, or hay or this gross meshy paste made of strings. However, I want fur that looks clean and well maintined, not wild or gross. But clean and natural, but I just can’t get it to look like this:

fur-reference.jpg1920×804 1.83 MB

This mesh is taken off from a character I have that is suppose to have lots of fur, but it just looks bad and terrible. I took a piece out of it to try and understand fur better, but I just can’t. Moving those sliders around does nothing for me but making things worse.

And yes I’ve seen Blender Guru’s video on fur, and CGGeek and others and none of them help me. I’m just stuck. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong and I can’t move forward with it.

I’m hoping someone here that has had succsess with fur in Blender can share their wisdom and help me make it better.

I’m using Blender 2.79 and here is the blend file with the exact mesh and settings I used for the picture above.

.Blend file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t6qvd95xbqag2fy/Fur_exp.blend?dl=0

#2

There are a few things you can do to make fur look more like fur…

  1. Add a texture - a gradient along the length of the fur, so that it’s a different colour at the root and the head

  2. Add a texture to control the colour of each hair - useful for spots, but a fine grain will add some variation

  3. clumping options in the particle children options

you’re getting there…

BTW I’m not an expert, and I’m sure there’s some quality tutorials out there.

#3

Found this… https://www.blendernation.com/2019/04/18/quick-guide-to-grooming-fur-in-blender-2-80/

#4

I do have a texture on the actual character. It’s suppose to have stripes on, but how do I give variation to individual strands while keeping the the stripe pattern on the whole body?

#5

Your stripe texture should have a subtle fine grain as well.

#6

What do you mean by grain? You mean a bump texture?

#7

I mean like

but suptle, over your stripe texture.

Each hair will inherit the colour of the texture at it’s root.

#8

It has to be black and white or can it be any color?

#9

It should be whatever colour you want your fur to be.

#10

Okay, I should be able to create one procedurally using a noise texture.

#11

First of all, have you tried experimenting with principled hair bsdf? First you get a simple fur settings you can play with textures.

#12

Fur looks very bad with that node. As far as I know, that only works for hair. Try to do any fur coating with that, and you’ll have weird glossyness and black bloches on the fur. It’s pretty bad honestly.

Why is Principled Hair BSDF not showing the underlying texture paint?
#13

I’ve seen fur done with that shader and it looked good. You have to pump up coat if I recall correctly.

#14

Isn’t the coat just to give the hair a “wet look” to it?

#15

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/nodes/types/shaders/hair_principled.html
Coat
Simulate a shiny coat of fur, by reducing the Roughness to the given factor only for the first light bounce (diffuse). Range [0,1] equivalent to a reduction of [0%,100%] of the original Roughness.

Not really. :wink:

References

This shader is an implementation of the paper by Chiang et al. [CBTB16], which was used in the Disney film, “Zootopia”®.

So I guess it’s really good for fur. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#16

And yet I get worse results with it and no one is using it either.