fur in max....

keizza

hey guys. i am creating a high poly character. she has fur on some of her clothing parts. here's my question: does anyone know of a way to build fur in max? i could do it out of a crapload of alphaed cards....just wondering if anyone has any other methods. i'm not really looking for plug-in stuff either.

thanks

Rick Stirling

Hmm...

You COULD maybe do it with a scatter array or a few modelled hairs. I used it once to make the grass in the image shown below.

Quasar

You can also give Ornatrix a try

ironbearxl

I remeber Bobo had a way to do it after seeing the Conker Cover of some game mag: http://www.bobotheseal.com/temp/WIP/bunny_head.jpg
I forgot how it's done though..

KDR_11k

That was the multiple shell approach, basically you create an alpha version of your skin and make some duplicates of your model, each scaled outwards along the normals a bit.

Justin Meisse

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That was the multiple shell approach, basically you create an alpha version of your skin and make some duplicates of your model, each scaled outwards along the normals a bit.

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Damn, that's pretty wild, I woulda never thought of that! Looks pretty good too, I'll have to keep that in mind for any future furry creatures.

thomasp

i've seen examples of grass made from (micro)displaced polygons. looked quite good - at least in stills. the advantage would be that there wouldn't be a lot of additional modelled detail in your scene but a mere heightmap would suffice.

will probably look crappy in animation though- as i guessall the other methods mentioned in this thread would do.
in case you're wanting to animate your character, there's probably no good looking alternative to fur plugins.

Mojo2k

i believe max 7.5 has a good fur and hair systems implimented into it (i may be wrong and that may not be coming in till 8 but still looks really good.. altho it doesnt help you much at all now, sorry about that.

Eric Chadwick

IMO, the shells-n-fins approach can look good even when animated, if it's done well. There used to be a demo here where you could push the hair around on a bunny. The problem I see is it's tough to generate the textures unless you have the programming skillz.

There's another demo here, though I couldn't get it to run for some reason. Though the first one was pretty cool to see in action, so maybe it's worth fiddling with this one to get it going...
http://awu.textdriven.com/word/2001/12/03/fast-furrier-transform/

Gmanx

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
That was the multiple shell approach, basically you create an alpha version of your skin and make some duplicates of your model, each scaled outwards along the normals a bit.

[/ QUOTE ]

Damn, that's pretty wild, I woulda never thought of that! Looks pretty good too, I'll have to keep that in mind for any future furry creatures.

[/ QUOTE ]

IL Sturmovic used the same approach for forests, like slices of tree getting smaller as they got higher - giving a conical shape. Bad explanation, but the process is sound. ;P

keizza

thanks for all the tips guys. once i finish my model i'll try some of these tips out.

thanks again!!!