Bake fur to a texture? (Maya)
ngon master
I've been looking around for a way to convert Maya fur to a texture and can't find anything. Most of the fur I'll be using is short and lays flat, I'll use planes for some longer areas.
Right now my only solution is to use the mopKnit script to make a flattened version of a model and render it flat. But then the seams suck and I lose out on rounded areas. I can't seem to instance the fur description between two meshes, only to bake each attribute out as a texture and re-link them back in. A minor pain, but a pain nonetheless.
Anyone have any tips or solutions here?
Right now my only solution is to use the mopKnit script to make a flattened version of a model and render it flat. But then the seams suck and I lose out on rounded areas. I can't seem to instance the fur description between two meshes, only to bake each attribute out as a texture and re-link them back in. A minor pain, but a pain nonetheless.
Anyone have any tips or solutions here?
Replies
maybe dis is what you're looking for
Did some tests with the flat idea, and it really doesn't work at all.
I could always do it in smaller batches. Can't find a way to do it, even the curves they use for previewing don't seem to be accessible in the scene. I might look at Blender this week.
I don't have Zbrush or Mudbox, and I'm on a pretty low spec computer right now (mine fried), not sure if they'd even run on this.
here it is: Pre-Rendered Fur Tiles for Texturing
oops, actually he just posted it on the pc threads aswell : Tutorial: Pre-Rendered Fur Tiles for Texturing
Read 2nd post
http://www.squirrelyjones.com/public/fur.pdf
Kinda gives an understanding on what Max set up is like.
What the tutorial guy used as a tutorial originally.
Thanks Beazel, I had remembered seeing squirrely's panda before, it looked fantastic. Never realized he had a tutorial up, looks like he used the flat approach I mentioned in my first post. (didn't expect the surprise ending!)
I'm still working on the model, I'll save the rest of my experiments for that. I'll post my results then.
Framing the flat uv-mesh to render at 1024x1024 is simple. But how would I go about maintaining a proper textel ratio when I'm swinging the camera around to catch the different parts?
I found this post, I get the idea of finding the areas of selected Polygons/UVs, but not how I can apply that to setting camera distance to the selection.
Edit to add pictures! For the facial pic, mine will have more standy-uppy hair, but this picture is overall better than refs that show that.
So you could "unfold" your geometry. Then just render it.
That said, and this being pretty niche and all, is anyone interested in a tutorial for this? Basically I'm mixing several techniques to get bakes, branching off from what squirrely jones did. I'd like to toss in tips and gotchas without my typical windy writing style.
I'd sure be interested to see what you came up with (and how), throttlekitty.
I'm doing cat fur now, and next dog fur, so you've got me attention!
I'll work on it this evening when I get back home as a refresher, and write a mini-tut for you.
Interestingly, I rendered out just a fur plate (ala, that other tutorial/process)
within Maya and then made a bit more alpha'd at the edges .png to use as a base-brush
for stamping within 3DCoat...worked out fairly 'ok' as a basic textural basecoat for
my cat. I may actually use it to drive Maya fur and see how it turns out, since my
project doesn't have any restrictions against using Maya fur itself:
^baked fur on the lowpoly model.
So, in this exercise pretend that I did a decent job with the fur. I'm still getting massive slowdown painting/grooming hair with a decent feedback preview, which dictates the resolution of the attribute maps. U and V samples in the furfeedbackshape=pixel resolution, even at 128x128, i find it unmanageable. The brush is very twitchy, particularly when applying direction as it is. Previewing changing the attributes in renders is a slow process especially with higher density fur, IPR helps, but there's no WSYWIG. I think the only saving grace with this is the overall complexity in color, overlapping using multiple fur systems on a mesh could be nice, but it is a very time consuming process.
Having said all that, the setup here is simple, I wanted to avoid the center mirror seam, so I UV'd a little past center with the intention of fixing the result in photoshop. In the top right, same mesh, but displayed at the 'uv-flat' output from the mopKnit script. I dropped a new ortho camera, set it to display resolution gate, and the background color similar to the average for the fur. Then I lined up the view to match the UVs by eyeballing it. I'm sure some science-y method could be used here, but I got pretty close on my first try, just a nudge in photoshop for this example. Render, save, done.
Going back to the results, there's the obvious seam issues that require a bit of work. Copy/pasting from the end section to the start section of another shell should work well, in the render, the hair actually continues past the flat-mesh. Other than that, it doesn't look bad, or wouldn't, with a bit of elbow grease, which this will not get.