A question about CG animals

[Littlenorwegians]

Now, I've been trying to figure this out and work with this for a while now.

In traditional animation and images, animals are easily cartoonified. Or at least, are quickly more easily identified or appealing.
I am having problems translating this to 3D and it's both technical and design related.

Now, I find hair and fur to be an intense pain to work with. Just can't seem to get it right and I cannot find good tutorials on it.
(I use Blender, GIMP and Sculptris, mainly)

I recently did this test and here is the result.


And then I tried textures...


Yeesh. So, it is fairly obvious I need help. So, please, any help you can give in regards to designing animals in 3D would be appreciated.

[justadeletedguy]

Hair and Fur in most CG is Faked. Blender and Zbrush have Particle Hair systems that involve geometry (most realistic). In Poser/Daz Studio and many game engines, hair is done using transparency in the UV texture which is applied to layers of simple geometry giving the appearance of hair (better for animation). Daz Studio as well as some of the older ray-trace renderer's also have Procedural Node systems, hair can be faked by applying a Noise/math function to a set of colors, producing a scribble-fur affect (old-school). And don't forget Photoshop (or any image editor), Photoshop Brushes work in Paint.Net as well. There are many Free Photoshop brushes available at Deviantart.com including Hair ....... Blender can probably do any of the above ......

[Littlenorwegians]

Experimenting a bit with something more minimalistic. What do you think?


My problem with hair and fur in Blender, which I use is that it's SOOO unwieldy, crash-prone and annoying. I never seen to get what I want out of it and I've spent hours trying to comb, cut and optimize stuff.

Any good tutorials on that? All I find are outdated or incredibly basic.

[justadeletedguy]

Try using a fur texture in Paint Mode with "Combine color and bump" checked in the options panel. You can get a lot more detail in Paint Mode in Sculptris.

[sculptrisnewb]

@ justadeletedguy I have read through quite a few of your posts now and I have come to the conclusion that you are a 3rd party Rep for every 3d program there ever was!! Am I right and you are actually making money for name dropping in EVERY SINGLE post?

[justadeletedguy]

I haven't made a dime doing this ..... but maybe I should change Strategy !! I've just been playing around with it for about 4 years now ... I kinda know a few things ..

[jayd]

I know everyone is commenting on fur but i have a workflow that I use for Sculptris and Zbrush--i create a Maquette in Sculptris, for instance, and then I capture photographs (jpeg) using the photo feature in the options section.

I take a Front, Side, and top view of the Maquette then I load those images into blender or whatever i happen to be using.---I build my subjects using three windows, one window for each view, then when i have built the model, I export it as an object and back into sculptris or zbrush for texturing.

I started doing this because, frankly, I just got tired of not having multiviewed references. Has made a serious difference in my process. Hope this helps.