Fur is murder Pt.1

When a furry character is needed, there are plugins for most packages to help you do this. Maya Fur was intoduced in Maya 7, along with it's flashy fluid and cloth effects. Before I looked into other methods of doing fur, I wanted to try it out for myself and see what is involved. Hopefully, at the end I will be able to make a coat of fur for TB, in whatever form using whatever method seems best. But from a technical skills standpoint, having a basic understanding of how fur effects work is essential in industry, as you can use it to make anything from fur, to fabrics to grass. It has many applications, and takes time to get right.

Here is the result of my first experiment (and no Paul, it's not a Mystic from Dark Crystal.) The model is not one that I created, it's a stock model that is used in a built in paint effects tutorial in maya. However, it beats putting fur onto a ball which is what every fur tutorial on the net does which is both nonsensical and completely impracticle. The only tut that came close was one that taught how to fur up a Furby. We all hate furbys, so dino it is.















As you can see it's pretty far from convincing, but it's not a bad start I think. The most important unique feature of Maya Fur is the "Paint fur attributes" tool. This tool allows you to litterally paint attributes such as length, baldness, scragginess and clumping etc directly onto your model. You also have the normal attribute editor to edit your fur description. There you detail the initial state of the fur before you tweak it with painted attributes. Here's a breakdown of the workflow I used to create the fur on the dino:

• Change the dino's skin to a suitable skin colour.
• Apply a basic fur description.
• Change basic values such as length, colours etc.
• Change the inclanation, polar and roll attributes so that the fur grows in roughly the right way.
• Paint attributes such as baldness, direction, fuzziness and clumping to achieve the right look.

It sounds simple enough, but then you have all the brush settings to figure out, things just don't go the way you want until you get the hang of it. Anyway, I think thats a good start and the next one I'll try some more variation and perhaps ass two fur descriptions to make whiskers etc.