Fur workflow overview

Preparing the scene

Prepare your scene as you would any scene you render, keeping in mind the following:

• You can put fur on all surfaces: NURBS, polygonal and subdivision surfaces.

  To put fur on a polygonal or subdivision surface, the surface must have good UVs (non-overlapping, and between 0 and 1 in the texture space). See Preparing polygon and subdivision surface models for fur.

  There are some limitations with fur on subdivision surfaces:

  • Direction painting does not work correctly. Paint the Polar attribute instead.
  • There is no color feedback for subdivision surfaces in the Paint Fur Attributes Tool.

  Due to these limitations, for major character work involving fur, you may want to convert your subdivision surfaces to polygons.

• Trimmed surfaces take longer to render.
• The scene uses the default light if there are no other lights in the scene. You may need to modify the lighting in your scene to achieve the fur effects you want. For example, you must modify the lights to create fur shading effects. See Fur shading effects.
• If you want to be able to have people work on a character’s fur and animation simultaneously, you may want to reference your models. This must be done before you start the project. See Work on an animation project.

Creating and attaching fur to models

You typically create fur by attaching a new fur description to selected surfaces. A fur description defines all the attributes for a particular type of fur, for example, fur color, width, length, baldness, opacity, scraggle, curl, density, and so on. You can also create unattached fur descriptions and attach them manually. And you can use Fur Presets.

You can attach one fur description to many surfaces, which is a good idea when you have many surfaces with a similar fur type. You can make adjustments to the fur attributes using the Paint Fur Attributes Tool or by mapping. See Paint fur attribute values and Map fur attribute values. For example, for a model of a cat you could apply a fur description called bodyFur to all the surfaces making up the cat’s body, legs and head, and paint or map attribute values to make the fur longer, shorter, or more scraggly, on specific areas.

You can also attach more than one fur description to a surface. In the cat model example, you could add an additional fur description to the surfaces around the cat’s nose for its whiskers.

For details on creating and attaching fur, see Create fur.

For examples on creating fur, whiskers, and other Fur effects, see Create body fur, whiskers, and eyelashes.

Modifying fur attributes

You can modify fur description attributes so that all surfaces with the fur description attached have the new attributes. You can also style a fur description, such as shorten or lengthen the fur on some parts of the model, by mapping attribute values, or by painting fur attribute values directly on the model using Maya Artisan. When you apply fur attribute value maps or paint fur attribute values, the global fur description attributes do not change.

For details on modifying fur attributes, see Change fur attributes.

Animating fur attributes

You can keyframe the changes you make to fur attributes, and thus animate effects like growing fur or changing fur color.

See Animate fur attributes.

Adding movement to fur

If you are animating your scenes, you can add movement to fur for a more natural effect. Using attractors, you can manually keyframe fur movement, or using Maya^® Dynamics^™, you can make the fur react to forces (for example, wind and gravity) or have fur react to the movement of the surface the fur is attached to (for example, a shaking dog).

See Add movement to fur.

Setting up shading effects

To create more realistic looking fur, you can create fur shading and shadowing effects. Do this by adding fur light attributes to the lights in your scene.

See Fur shading effects.

Rendering the scene

To see the fur effects on your models, you must render the scene. By default, the renderer composites the rendered fur with the rendered models, distributing the fur evenly across each surface (even where the parameterization is uneven, for example, at the poles of a sphere).

See Render scenes with fur.

Refining settings

After rendering your scene, you may have to adjust the lighting and fur attributes to achieve the effect you want. Re-render after making changes.

For suggestions on refining fur effects, see Troubleshoot Fur.