Hello!
We needed a shaderball for the lookdev and texturing tutorial for fur! I was going to go on a more traditional furball way, but I decided to go on a pretty creepy path! Behold the furry ball!
Redshift and xgen, the groom is just a placeholder as I want to add many fur styles to this thing, and I needed a short base to start.
this we are about to finally start the in-depth tutorial, sometimes we dont need a whole character to test grooms, templates or even to see how a material looks. So I decided to build a proper set up that we could use and that is stable enough to give us everything we need for our renders.
(I still need to improve the SSS in the nose )
The Idea
I was planning to do a more traditional shader ball, but after thinking abit more about it, we will always lack the complex shapes, density blends and angles of a face, which is one of the best areas to put fur as we have plenty variations possible. From long hair, to short, curly, hairstyles, beards, goaties.
The model
We started with the fox topology, but then I reallized that it would take a long time to make it work, so I broke it with dynamesh and defined a better shape.
Every start sucks right ?
Then I just added more volume, as I have been rusty modeling, I wanted to try something that has way more freedom.
And so the thing started to be usable!
Our Final is looking something like this. It has enough volumes to see fur variations on muscles and complex shapes. This will helps us alot with the speculars.
Texturing
The textures are not complex, its actually a handpainted colour in zbrush, nothing fancy. But I did combined some thickness maps from substances and colour correction in maya. I need to revisit my textures properly soon.
The Scene
The scene again is a simple one, I want this to be replicated in both houdini and maya, as they will share everything so I needed the scene to be as simple as we could make it with the best result for our process. The goal is to have a neutral scenario where we can render a good amount of fur, different heights and samples.
One light + 1 HDR
I went for one single light, and one HDRI here, I wanted to use just the single HDR, but I needed to pick up some nice bright reflections and make him pop a bit more. So I added the light.
Out HDRI comes from HDRIHAVEN and is out good old Approaching Storm, this version is the Desat version on a resolution of 2k.
The Grooms
The plan here is to create as many variations as possible of groom templates, that we will be able to render and see the results of the different materials and presets without having to generate a super complex animal scene.
For the first test I am using Xgen for the groom and rendering as RSproxies.
