Beyond the lesson

The Teddy Bear now has brown fur and whiskers. The fur in the bear’s ears is a lighter brown color.

In this lesson you learned how to:

• Duplicate surfaces across the axis of symmetry—you duplicated the arm and body surfaces and created a mirror-copy of them.
• Rename surfaces—Naming objects as you create them ensures you can easily identify and select them later on.
• Assign parts of a model to display layers—any surfaces that you did not want fur applied were assigned to a referenced display layer so they would not get selected accidentally.
• Assign an existing fur description preset to a model—Fur presets are a useful starting point for creating various fur types. All of the fur presets included with Maya can be customized. You also created a new fur description for the inner ear surfaces and customized its attributes.

  You can assign more than one fur description to a surface. In this lesson, you added a second fur description to the bear’s snout in order to create whiskers.

• Reverse surface normals so the fur was oriented to point in the correct direction—Two methods are possible for correcting the normals; reversing the surface normals, and reversing the fur normals.
• Modify the direction of the fur description on individual surfaces using the Fur Description Offset—when a model is comprised of multiple surfaces the fur description may point in different directions. You can modify the fur direction using a variety of techniques depending on the situation.
• You modified the length of the fur description on the bear’s snout and created whiskers using the Paint Fur Attributes Tool. This tool lets you paint an attribute map to modify specific fur attributes on an area of a surface.

  You can use the Paint Fur Attributes tool to paint the direction of the fur. This technique is also referred to as combing the fur because it resembles the stroking action you perform when combing real hair. Combing the fur feedback is useful when you need to hide a visible seam between two surfaces.

• Modify fur attributes—You learned how to modify the attributes of a fur description using the Attribute Editor.

  Though not covered in this lesson, you can keyframe changes you make to fur attributes to animate effects such as growing fur or changing fur color. You can add movement to fur with attractors and dynamics. Using attractors, you manually keyframe fur movement. Using dynamics, you can make the fur react to forces, for example, wind and gravity. You can also use dynamics to cause fur to react to movement of the attached surface, for example, when a dog shakes itself.

• UV texture coordinates—When applying fur to a surface the UVs must be laid out so they are non-overlapping and reside between 0 and 1 in the UV texture space. The UVs were prepared for the model in this lesson but you should remember this when you assign Fur to your own models.

For more information and related techniques about Fur, refer to the Maya Help.