Hi, I have a suggestion 
I’ve been playing with fibermesh in order to make a fur on an animal that I’ve modelled. For fun. It turned out that it’s almost impossible to make what I wanted to do. The thing is, I wanted to bake that fur into a texture afterwards but it just won’t stick to the surface, the skin of the animal. No matter which grooming brush I try, it just keeps rising too far out of the skin. Even if I do make it right on the side, when I start working on the front of the model, it messes up the sides.
The thing is, fibermesh seems great for long hair and human hair in general, but making sure that fur has the right flow and directoin along the skin of the animal is pretty hard. Or is it that there’s some tool or option that I don’t know of yet? It’s especially hard for making fur flow along the zig-zag shape of the back legs if those are modeled in a bent pose.
Actually, I did manage to make some use of it, but only by grooming part-by part of the mesh and then baking it in parts. But as you can see in the image, the blending seams are very visible. It’s a very tedious process and the traditional methods give better results.
That brings me to the suggestion. It would be great if we could have some sort of control over the flow of the fibers while creating them. For example, it could be done by drawing a few 3Dcurves which would guide the hairs. Like in the image below.
By this method, it might be possible to make fur that sticks to the skin, flowing correctly, then bake the new furred mesh onto a low-poly model together with normal-maps, displacement etc. The way things are now, the fur sticks too far out of the mesh to be baked nicely.
It would be similar to hair&fur in 3DSMax. The method of making hair&fur by making guide-splines.
Thanks for reading this, cheers.
Attachments
