Texturing advice on a giraffe, or short haired animals in general

BARDLER

So I am working on a making a giraffe at the moment and have the high poly nearly done. I plan on doing completely unique UVs across the whole animal because of the nature of the spotting pattern which would look weird if it were mirrored. I plan on painting the spots by hand in zbrush and baking it to a map to finish texturing it photoshop.

What I am confused about is how to get the short hair to read well in the diffuse, spec, normal ect. I am doing a realistic style so I want the final textures to reflect that as well. Does anybody have good examples they could show me or any advice at all?

I use Maya, zbrush, photoshop, xnormal, and ndo2 if that makes a difference.

Eric Chadwick

There's a nice tutorial for the Pandicarius character here. Also some links at the bottom that might help
http://wiki.polycount.com/HairTechnique

nyx702

Alot of those links are dead it seems.

I am glad the Panda tutorial is saved in a PDF because all his images on the thread are broken too.

Eric Chadwick

Yep, that's the nature of the web unfortunately. Wish I had the inclination to save all those cool things, make PDFs or archives. But who has the time?

BARDLER

Hmm the panda technique could work, but how would I blend those patches over UV shells to avoid seams? Or do you think I could do maya fur across the entire giraffe and bake that out as my base?

Eric Chadwick

You could try that. Probably the highest-end results. You could also just make a good hair-like brush and paint it using a 3d paint program.

http://wiki.polycount.com/PaintingAcrossSeams#Integrated_3D_Paint

Ace-Angel

Baking shouldn't interfere with your UV seams, and you should be able to define colors for the patches with a texture via the material, although I'm not sure Max or Maya have that right out of the box and you need a plugin?

Or, you could spend 5 seconds looking up a picture and notice that giraffe's don't have patches in the inner parts of their bodies, so you can position your UV-seams in places where patches don't occur naturally, like the middle of their belly, inner legs, on their back where spiky fur is, etc.

BARDLER

Ace-Angel wrote: »

Baking shouldn't interfere with your UV seams, and you should be able to define colors for the patches with a texture via the material, although I'm not sure Max or Maya have that right out of the box and you need a plugin?

Or, you could spend 5 seconds looking up a picture and notice that giraffe's don't have patches in the inner parts of their bodies, so you can position your UV-seams in places where patches don't occur naturally, like the middle of their belly, inner legs, on their back where spiky fur is, etc.

That is only for the legs, but I will need seams around the head and neck which the fur patch method will give me issues. I am going to mess around with some Maya fur and see if I can get some decent results and report back here in a few days.

throttlekitty

I experimented with Maya fur and ultimately gave up, some of what I came up with to actually bake the fur out is in this thread. Fur only exists when rendered, I couldn't find a way to bake it to a texture, so there's a bit of workaround that needs to be done.