Baked monkey fur
polycounter lvl 3
Hi! I finished this guy, and I thought I could share the trick I used to make the texture in Blender.
model
The idea was to export the UV layout and setup a scene with an ortho camera facing a plane on which I generated and combed some hair to follow the flow of the UV layout.
To give the texture more depth, I used the "puff" tool, so the hair wasn't completely flattened on the plane.
I also used a procedural Voronoi as base material on the plane (the strands colors are determined by the color at their base). Finally there is a subtle gradient from the base to the tip of the strands. That's the simple hair shader:
The plane without hair:
After this I rendered some bits of fur on an alpha background and projected them onto the model to hide the seams in 3D texture mode. That's the part that didn't work well, as it got pretty messy around the seams.
The final texture before baked AO looks like this:
In the end, the process took a lot of time because of a lot of trial and error (especially tweaking the hair rendering, with some pretty long iteration times), but I probably wouldn't have been able to reach this level of quality result manually.
Hope you like it!
model
The idea was to export the UV layout and setup a scene with an ortho camera facing a plane on which I generated and combed some hair to follow the flow of the UV layout.
To give the texture more depth, I used the "puff" tool, so the hair wasn't completely flattened on the plane.
I also used a procedural Voronoi as base material on the plane (the strands colors are determined by the color at their base). Finally there is a subtle gradient from the base to the tip of the strands. That's the simple hair shader:
The plane without hair:
After this I rendered some bits of fur on an alpha background and projected them onto the model to hide the seams in 3D texture mode. That's the part that didn't work well, as it got pretty messy around the seams.
The final texture before baked AO looks like this:
In the end, the process took a lot of time because of a lot of trial and error (especially tweaking the hair rendering, with some pretty long iteration times), but I probably wouldn't have been able to reach this level of quality result manually.
Hope you like it!