Trying to create a fur throw

[tricky]

Anyone had luck with a fur throw? I have the geometry for the underlying throw, but getting fur/hair to play ball with this high-poly, undulating mesh has me a little stumped.

This is the kind of thing I am trying to do:


This is a screen grab of the throw geometry (created in MD, and ProOptimised):-


This is a 600x600 render I left going last night with VrayFur - obviously no texture applied (apart from a falloff on the strands of fur so I could see what was going on). It took 10 hours on my workstation:-


Its probably easier for me to shoot photography of the real thing, but I'd like to get a result in render if at all possible. I am currently looking at the inbuilt hair/fur controls to see if that approach is any better. On complicated, folded geometry like this, I wouldn't be able to 'style' the fur in the normal way (i.e. with a brush control in the viewport). Is there a way for Max hair/fur to fall in a similar way to the VrayFur 'automatically'?

[Crush]

You will need an incredible amount of hair for this kind of fur, and styling this is a real p.i.t.a with max hair&fur. Maybe have a look at Hairfarm (http://www.hair-farm.com/) or Ornatrix (http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/).

[AJ Jefferies]

I reckon you could get a pretty good result using hair & fur. It might be that instead of populating all of the hair realistically, you go for wider strands to thicken it out without things going too crazy. I'd genuinely like to have a crack at this but got other things on my plate

[tricky]

Thanks for the suggestions. I am still trying with Hair&Fur. Its pretty intensive. There are HUGE delays after I click render where max just becomes locked up. Not sure why. Ram usage is quite low and CPU usage is very low - like a few percent (say maybe 1 core). Eventually it begins to render, and the render bit of it is reasonably quick (granted this is a very low resolution test). Ram usage goes to about 10GB or so.

[tricky]

I reckon you could get a pretty good result using hair & fur. It might be that instead of populating all of the hair realistically, you go for wider strands to thicken it out without things going too crazy. I'd genuinely like to have a crack at this but got other things on my plate

Let me know if you want the throw geometry and I'll send you a link.

[YoyoBoy]

If the camera doesn't need to get too close to it, you could fake things a little by using the fur to add detail to a bitmapped surface. So you'd map the surface of the object with a fur image that you like, then add just enough VRayFur -mapped with the same material- to make it sell.

[tricky]

If the camera doesn't need to get too close to it, you could fake things a little by using the fur to add detail to a bitmapped surface. So you'd map the surface of the object with a fur image that you like, then add just enough VRayFur -mapped with the same material- to make it sell.

The throw will be about 1m from the camera on a 4k render.

[cheerioboy]

Let me know if you want the throw geometry and I'll send you a link.

Mind sharing the geometry? I might have some downtime today to take a stab at this

[cheerioboy]

A bit of a hack.

The biggest thing was just taking a fur image and creating a texture which is applied to the source geometry and hair. The VrayHair then has the texture mixed with a vray hair material in a blend material. The fur could then get some of those nice spec and refraction things from the vray hair mat, plus variation from the fur texture. I used the Vray Fur Styler to push the hairs around so they have a better sense of movement/direction than just going crazy all over the place.

Switched hair distribution from 'Per face' to 'Per area', I think this makes more sense since the size of the faces of the source object change so much. And dialed the amount up to 1000. If the view isn't going to see the whole throw, I'd hack off the geometry to keep the source object smaller/leaner, and possibly dial the hair distribution up higher.

Lighting for my test was with an interior HDRI, lighting plays a huge role in getting that vray hair material to look nice.

What do you think?

[tricky]

I think it looks bloody good Brendan. Nice effort. I haven't even used/seen the vray fur styler - I'll look for info on that. I will post my results.

[Morbid Angel]

looks good, I'd suggest adding some fur clumps as well as working on the highlite - anisotropy.