I haven't come across someone who's made hair/fur look so incredible in 3D that's awesome
Do you have tutorials for how you style and color it or any specific materials you use for it? I'd like to try out styling hair like that somewhere down the line but my past attempts haven't been the best
thank you! I assume you're talking about sunpaw so I will talk about her fur I guess!
she's rendered in blender 5.1 cycles with the principled hair bsdf at these settings
for styling and colouring I have been recording making her so when she's done I'll have a whole timelapse showing my grooming and colouring process.
grooming is uh. its own whole thing, you really just have to keep doing it again and again until you can properly vibe out what does and doesn't look good. but obviously I'm self taught and I never really watch tutorials so the way I do it could be very very stupid and weird.
you really just need to enjoy the process and not give a shit when your grooms turn out bad because unless you're a god among men your grooms WILL turn out bad for a while. ummmmm oh yeah also use references! definitely for when you're actually doing the groom but ALSO find references of bald animals, fur really changes their shape a lot more than you might expect, like 'short' fur is longer than you might think
like you see the orange outline here is sunpaws actual mesh
UMMM for colouring definitely pay attention to how the fur will offset the actual markings, complex markings do TERRIBLY on long fur, I wouldn't even bother attempting it. also lit fur tends to wash out colour so if you're doing a character you should probably adjust the colours ahead of time (I'm horrible at doing this lol)
you also need to do some shader fuckery with your fur to add some more texture and depth before you light them, like here is sunpaw with zero lighting applied to her, this is just flat colours, on the left is just the texture, and the right is the texture with shader fuckery applied
this is especially important if you're not going to use cycles to render, I do think cycles IS usually the best choice if you want to do anything with fur but there are plenty of reasons to use eevee, like on my last computer a single highly optimized 100 sample render would take about. 2 hours. fuck that! eevee is definitely more difficult to get fur looking good but it can be done. IiiiiIII'm not going to cover that now because thats its own whole post lol
uuuh heres my setup so far! keep in mind of course that this models a bigass wip and I intend to change this up a lot
uuuh and I guess one last thing for colouring is that the skin should be darker, I usually just use a multiply node on the image texture before pluging it into a shader node
and I know you didn't ask but lighting is also really important to getting nice looking fur, go download some nice .exrs!!!!
the way I usually light is by setting my world strength to 0 so I can focus on getting my main light in a good place, then using the world as a fill light and gradually increasing the strength until I'm happy with it
I would recommend using an area light since it gives you a lot of control, and uuuh probably don't use too many lights in your scene, I usually just use 1 area light and an exr for the fill, but sometimes I use 2 area lights to get a rimlight.
you can baldify your model while you're positioning your lights since its SUPER render intensive, but keep in mind that fur reallly changes your characters silhouette and reacts differently to lighting than skin and shit, sometimes I switch to eevee and set up a shader there just for lighting, then I can switch back to cycles
OH um also if you're using eevee probably don't use exrs heavily, theres this setting for lights, contact shadows, which can add a lot of depth to your fur, but then exrs will wash it out. but also idk eevees had a lot of changes so my advice could be wildly outdated
um UM fuck I haven't even gone over strand length or anything. uh uh. this post is already long. and I don't have any tutorials to recommend becuase I don't know any. FUCK FUCK SHIT AUUGUGHHHHH
OKAY OKAY WAHTEVER I'M LEAVING OUT A LOT BECAUYSE I'M A BAD PERSON I GUESS. UM. JUST UH YOU JUST GOTTA DO IT. JUST MAKE IT AND IT WILL LOOK BAD AND YOU WILL AHVE FUN AND YOU WILL LEARN AND ONE DAY IT WILL LOOK LES BAD BUT YOU WONT CARE BECAUSE IT WILL STILL BE FUN I THINK IDK I'M NOT REALLY A GOOD TUTORIAL PERSON HOPE THIS HELPS I DOn"T FEEL LIKE PROOFREADING BYYEEEE
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