I’m exploring ways to displace V-Ray Fur, in this case, grass/landscape, when objects sit within the Fur. At the moment I have several lawn chairs in the grass but the blades of grass/fur show through the object rather than displacing around the object. At first I thought this behavior would be automatic but I was mistaken. Is there a setting within the Fur parameters to recognize objects or is there another method I am not seeing and/or figuring out?
That’s a solid way of doing it for sure. Downside being its not dynamic so if any adjustment/movement of object is required we must refill the space and repeat the process. I will just have to go with that method until something slicker reveals itself.
It would be massive if V-Ray detected the object, flattened under and spread fur around sides automatically. Maybe a feature to consider Chaos Group (if anyone from the dev team reads this)?
This is actually doable.
We’ll log it as a feature request and implement it as soon as we figure out a good way to present it in the UI (as a workflow).
Here is one quite old video showing the approach in 3ds Max:
A workflow idea to achieve this dynamically with the existing options: add a dirt texture to the fur (grass) length map of the fur, with the dirt texture set to ignore self-occlusion, so that it will only have dirt (ie black colour on teh length map) when occluded by another object?
With the right settings for the dirt texture (colours and radius), it might be possible to automatically set the length of the fur to 0 when in direct contact of another object?
The Dirt workflow will unfortunately not work.
The Fur is generated before the actual ray-tracing starts and the dirt mapping will have no effect.
This is exactly why the distance texture was implemented.
It works in a different way allowing for things like displacement or fur to be controlled by it.
Hi Konstantin,
Thanks for the clarification. Didn’t actually watch this video before making the suggestion…
The Skatter SketchUp plugin has a similar concept of picking and adding groups/components to create a falloff effect when adding proxies to the model. Could be a good starting point for the design of the UI in SketchUp. Or maybe using V-Ray’s built in object ID?
Looks like an interesting functionality that would be quite useful in SketchUp.
