Renamon Fur

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Attention! Download for full size 1800x2100 !
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Always wanted to experiment a bit with blenders hair system. Decided to use the renamon model for this experiment. It had been quite a problem as I hit a bunch of problems.

lessons learned:
- Mirror Modifier does not work together with Particle Hair
- Converting Particle Hair into Mesh does not work (only edges, no faces, and especially no weight painting taken over)
- Particle Hair is linked to objects so no way to share them without duplicating objects
- Cycles can not render Particle Hair
- Hair-Objects do not bend along the path (maybe some other object type can?)
- Ray-Tracing Ambient Occlusion makes random fur patches vanish (works with Approximation AO)

Especially the cycles part annoyed me as I wanted to see how fur looks like with a physical renderer like cycles. So I had to revert to Blender internal rendering for this render. I used here three textures to influence the fur: fur color, fur density and fur length. The tail doesn't seem to properly work yet. Maybe I have to "fluff it up" like the chest hairs to give it more volume. For a first test though this is not bad.

So here is a first version rendered with Blender and Approx AO. The shininess is on purpose as with cats you also say if it has shiny fur it is in good health


UPDATE:
Found out there are some additional hair controls I didn't see to begin with. Helps to trim the hair and fluff things where you want to. Trimmed hair in the wrong place, combed some more and fluffed the tail and a bit the shoulder thingies. The tail is difficult but it looks better now. Also upped the hair children count and adjusted the specular reflection a bit.

The old image can be found at: [link]


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