In this training video you will learn how to create, comb, shade and render realistic looking hair by making use of Blender's often underestimated, yet extremely powerful particle-system. With Blender's hair-creating capabilities, you can take your creatures to the next level. because even the best model will look dull without some decent fur. This tutorial will explain the essential tools and settings that you need to cover our mammoth with some dirty, woolly, fuzzy fur.
| Date Released | • | 11/30/2011 |
| Duration | • | 01.35.33 |
| Artist | • | Chris Maynard |
| Artist | • | Sebastian Koenig |
| PM | • | Chris Maynard |
| Producer | • | cmiVFX |
| Chapters | • | 1 |
Edit Hairs
Blender provides you with a variety of tools to create and edit realistic looking hair. Blender's weight-painting-tools give you a lot of flexibility to limit the fur to certain areas and control its roughness, length or density with different vertex-groups. After you've setup the base for the fur, you enter particle-mode and become a real CG-hairstylist! Comb the hair, add more particles, change the length or cut them in an intuitive and easy way. Also, by making use of child-particles in a unique way, you can keep render-times and memory-usage reasonably low.
Hair Shading
But of course, without decent shading and realistic materials, even the best haircut will look like of pot spaghetti. This portion of the video shows you how to setup your materials to achieve natural looking fur. Map gradients along the strands, use stencil-maps to map different textures to different areas and setup textures to control the particle-properties.You'll also learn how to give the fur some roughness, make it clump together and even add braiding to the hairs. And of course all these properties can be controlled by vertex-groups and/or textures.
Child Simplification
If you want to render a flock of mammoths or any other crowd of hairy things then you can easily run out of memory if you don't use a way to optimize your scene. Especially if you have some furry creatures in the background, then you really don't need to render every very strand, because as they get smaller on the screen, you wouldn't see them anyway. In some realms of visual effects, they refer to this as LOD or Level Of Detail. In this scenario, its privileged to Blender on sorting out this management appropriately. This tutorial shows you how to easily get rid of unneeded particles by using "child-simplification" to optimize your scene.
About the Author
Sebastian König is a German 3D-artist who is working as a freelancer and CG-instructor for several years now. During his studies for Education of Art he discovered the joy of modeling and creating 3D-Animations with Blender and hasn't stopped since. Being a passionate Blender-User he has been teaching Blender at the University of Art and Design Halle/Germany. He has been working for various studios and companies as a 3D-Artist and freelancer. During the dozens of projects and jobs he completed with Blender he got a profound knowledge of almost every aspect of this great Open-Source 3D-application.