Trying to make a fur material.
polycounter lvl 10
I'm trying to teach myself how to make realistic fur materials and to be honest I haven't a clue what I'm doing. I'm just a hobbyist 
I'm hoping you folks can give some pointers.
There's so many ways you can deal with fur, it's bewildering. Currently I'm just looking at the "skin" material. No alpha planes or concave shells or whatnot yet.
I'm playing around under the following assuptions:
-I need to make an animal that needs to be seen very up close. Let's assume a gnome with a wolf as mount.
-The model will have no logical places for seams to split it up into subtools for sculping detail fur, It's a "naked" animal. It's going to run into detail problems while sculpting.
-The model will require materials for current gen and for "next" gen. I think those are pbr materials, next gen is new to me.
While testing methods I'm working with just a head though.
I think a important target would be to bake a quality normal map and AO map and use those as base to generate the rest of the needed maps. I'm really not sure.
Based on that I tried sculpting in fur detail but it needed so many polygons for just the head that a full body would end up being near 30 million. Not really viable.
Here on polycount I found a thread about baking fibers. I seem to be having some succes with that. I'm afraid it will be very noisy when viewed from a distance though and normals are the only maps that bake well from this. AO looks useless to me.
currently trying Max's hair modifier, see if I can render that to texture. So far this is an excercise in frustration and I have no clue what I am doing.
So my questions for you wonderful folks:
What kind of maps would I need to make for a next gen animal?
What other fur making methods would you advise?
How would you aproach making an animal character fur material following my assumptions? Especially interested in how you would get the detail in the fur without it getting noisy from a distance.
Cheers.
I'm hoping you folks can give some pointers.There's so many ways you can deal with fur, it's bewildering. Currently I'm just looking at the "skin" material. No alpha planes or concave shells or whatnot yet.
I'm playing around under the following assuptions:
-I need to make an animal that needs to be seen very up close. Let's assume a gnome with a wolf as mount.
-The model will have no logical places for seams to split it up into subtools for sculping detail fur, It's a "naked" animal. It's going to run into detail problems while sculpting.
-The model will require materials for current gen and for "next" gen. I think those are pbr materials, next gen is new to me.
While testing methods I'm working with just a head though.
I think a important target would be to bake a quality normal map and AO map and use those as base to generate the rest of the needed maps. I'm really not sure.
Based on that I tried sculpting in fur detail but it needed so many polygons for just the head that a full body would end up being near 30 million. Not really viable.
Here on polycount I found a thread about baking fibers. I seem to be having some succes with that. I'm afraid it will be very noisy when viewed from a distance though and normals are the only maps that bake well from this. AO looks useless to me.
currently trying Max's hair modifier, see if I can render that to texture. So far this is an excercise in frustration and I have no clue what I am doing.
So my questions for you wonderful folks:
What kind of maps would I need to make for a next gen animal?
What other fur making methods would you advise?
How would you aproach making an animal character fur material following my assumptions? Especially interested in how you would get the detail in the fur without it getting noisy from a distance.
Cheers.
Replies
I tried simply painting fur layering dark grey to light grey on a black background. I then used that as a heightmap to overlay detail on the heads normal map and bloody hell that worked really really well. No idea that simple drawn details would work so well, looks much better then sculpted hair.
So that solves, for me, how to get detail without ending up with retarded high amounts of polies and how to get the maps for the current gen.
Remains one important question:
What do I actually need to do for a next gen/pbr material animal fur?
All I'm sure about is that I'll need an albedo map.