thank you all for your answers. The idea of turning fur into mesh also came to me before going to sleep. I will try it. But looking at this character, I understand that they baked normals with the help of Arnold. I will still look for information on how to do it, because there is no video on the Internet where at least any…
it's been a few years since it last came up for me but assuming they haven't broken everything you can use arnold to bake the native xgen fur down. it's orders of magnitude faster than converting to mesh and baking from that you need to use arnold utility nodes and muck around with materials but you can get normals,…
hours? pretty much any bake is done in seconds these days. no idea how fast arnold bakes, but yes baking with maya can add hours. insane how slow the native baker is, but its single core and as old as time, so go figure :D
This vaguely described Arnold business sounds like a good way for the not-so-technical user to spend a week digging through tutorials and finding out about corner cases and obscure bugs. I sense quality times ahead! Or … convert to geometry as suggested by Neox. Use a small chunk of fur to find suitable conversion and bake…
I didn't read every replay so forgive me if I repeat something already said, but: I've done this in a pretty straightforward way by convert fur to mesh and then bake onto mesh in toolbag. IIRC you can combine both the original normal map and the fur at same time in a single bake. If the mesh geometry is so dense that…