Vertex Groups, UVW maps, fur and materials

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi everyone,

I’m brand new here, so forgive me if this is well-trodden ground. I searched the forums but couldn’t find the answer. I’m trying to do something in Blender that I’m sure it’s capable of–but I’m as yet still grappling with understanding the materials and textures area, so forgive my slowness and ineptitude. What I’m trying to do is give a creature a mane of fur. I’d like to color that fur. I understand that I can assign a vertex group and make my fur come out of a specific portion of the mesh this way. What I can’t seem to get is how to affect the color and rendering of the fur once I have created it. I can assign a material, but that re-colors my mesh at the selection. I try creating new materials, and then I can’t seem to link them to my fur. There’s obviously some vital information I’m missing here and so I’ve given up and if anyone can lend me any assistance on how to color a vertex grouping of fur, that would be great. I attached the creature for reference. Thank you in advance for any help.
Ethan

Attachments

bluecreature.jpg800×600 33.2 KB

2

Ok several questions here:
First which blender version are you using? (There has been a major overhaul of particles in 2.46 which is in Release Candidate state at the moment)

Second the particle system is assigned to a mesh which is the emitter so if you use the same mesh for emitting the particles (fur) and for displaying the body you will have to use the same color for the body as for the fur. An easy way out is to duplicate the body mesh and use the duplicate as an emitter and not render the emitter. You might also want to scale down the duplicate a tiny bit using ALT+S (scale along normals) to make the particles actually come out of the body mesh.