I never attempted to do a rug like that but if you’re using vray fur you could make use the of the feature where the fur picks up the color from the texture of the base object. That way you can get some color variance by using a noise map for example. For the sheen did you try playing around with falloff map in the color or reflection slot?
I did try both falloffs yes, cant seem to get such extreme differences without it looking rubbish.
I had a quick go with it during lunch and you are right its pretty tricky to get the falloff curves right without it looking awful from all directions. Definitely more complicated than I thought. On the other hand I totally forgot about the vray hair mtl I think that should get you pretty close at least it looked promising during my 1 min playtest.
I was hoping the hairmtl would save the day, but I cant get a good result from it.
User error Im sure…
You will need to increase the glossiness for the primary hilight, I guess. Also, smaller lights will produce better defined hilights than larger lights.
Best regards,
Vlado
In the past i’ve used fake lights with an include on the rug and only affect specular turned on. Totally faked it, but worked. My material was also set up with additive blends to push the specular to unrealistic levels
I also did it using geometry and forest pro - the geometry was all bent over to one side with rotation/sheen patches handled through a noise map in forest. that probably doesnt make a difference at the end though
Still wasn’t ideal, but might be worth mixing some of that in.
I got some great results using the VrayFur Styler - http://help.chaosgroup.com/vray/misc/
Taking Vlado’s advice I added a few point lights (1 warm, 1 cool) - there’s also an HDRI of an interior for subtle reflections - used the VRayHairMtl with the default ‘brown shiny’ & a fur texture, 50.0 in the diffuse.
The styler is what really does it, just sweeping around the brush to get those hairs going in different directions for catching the light just right. For that rug I’d break it down into square patches and do this -
protip: I had to collapse the stack on the geometry reference to get the VrayFur Styler to update in the viewport in realtime - otherwise each time I opened the scene the update would be visible
protip2: when happy with the results - collapse mesh completely to keep the vertex channels but remove the modifier so that you can render without issue on other machines (or install VrayFur Styler on all nodes…)
Heh very cool 
Glad that it worked out well.
Best regards,
Vlado
I really wish FurStyler was in VRay as a default. It’s not currently available for Max2014, and really should be native with the vray installation.
Totally agree - although this is only the second time I’ve dug it up to try and use it. It does a fantastic job of helping make those hairs look somewhat presentable
Thanks for mentioning that plugin. Haven’t heard of it before
It’s not recompiled very quickly per max release. Recompile for 2014 x64 sometime please :).
Some great pointers. Thanks!
FWIW I was able to get vrayfurstyler to work in 2014, I just put the 2013 plugin in the 2014 folder.
I can confirm what AlexP said. Usually 2013 compatible plugins work in 2014.
You can use the 2013 version, it will work just fine. Other than that, the VRayFurStyler plugin uses a part of the 3ds Max API (painter interface) that is not very well documented; also working with it is a bit quirky, if we include it in the installation it needs to be easier to use.
Best regards,
Vlado
Another test with the VrayFurStyler
This is using the Brown matted preset, with a texture half influencing the diffuse. Lit with an HDRI
I can’t believe I hadn’t been using this before - I think I had just been avoiding VRayFur all together. Is there a way to bake the vertex color map to be used as a regular RGB map in the bend/direction slots of VRayFur? Would be great to just make a few maps that mess up the fur for times when you don’t have time to sit and style.
Yes, you can use texture baking for that (f.e. put a VertexColor map in the color slot of a VRayLightMtl material).
Best regards,
Vlado
