Help! Help! for FUR

[Winner]

As far as I know Maya fur does not support instancing of geometry to fur descriptions.

You can try Joe Alter's `shave and a haircut` for maya - this does support the kind of thing you are tying to do.

Alternativley, you could try a `plugin free` solution. You could use nurbs surfaces to describe the surface `flow` of your character, then use geometryPaint to paint on multiple low poly geometry feathers ( a single tri with a texture map should be fine ) then use a skinned low-poly version of your character as a wrap deformer to drive the deformation of the feathers.

i have used this solution in my own personal work, and it works remarkably well.

note:
if you use geometryPaint with lots of objects ... make sure you turn the `attach` option to off - otherwise your maya session will die a slow horrible death ;)

[dreamsdestiny]

But, feathers getting deform while mesh stretch. Can u tell me how to overcome this.

[Winner]

hey SanthoshG,

Yes `shave and a haircut` supports maya software render and mental ray as far as i know.

if you are creating a character that is not ultra-realsitic, the geometryPaint technique will work well.. especially if your character is a stylized cartoony design.

The hardest thing to do when using geometryPaint for feathers, is to describe the `flow` of the feathers over the body. You can only paint geometry onto nurbs surfaces, so you will need to make a rough version of your characters body using nurbs anyway - but this nurbs surface also desribes the direction the geometry will follow when painted.
I created a series of curves, then i lofted between them one after the other to create the general direction of the feathers. Once the feathers are created, you can select individual ones, or groups of them and rotate them around to align them as you need. Once the feathers were all created and shaded as i wanted them, i combined all the feathers into a single piece of geometry, then i used a low poly version of the character that had been skinned to the skeleton as a wrap deformer to drive the deformationof the feather geometry.

The success of this technique is based firmly on how successfully you apply the feathers and their direction of flow over the character, and of course variation is size and texture to get the look you want. ---

edit:

i just saw your edit...

yes the feathers will stretch using this technique - which is why i said its best for cartoony characters. Alternativley you can use the `attach` option in the geometryPaint to get a more realistic attachment of the feathers to the surface, but then you will need to accuratley skin your nurbs surface.... i found that overall the squashing and stretching of the feathers did not actually look bad at all, and actually created a more consistent visual look than when the feathers held their shape correctly ( this incured other problems - like interpenetration of the character mesh and surrounding feathers, and `patching` in areas where the deformation was large )

[dreamsdestiny]

Hey Winner,

Actualy i try to replicate the chicken little character with slight modification, just to learn the process for future short movie. Am not that much confident with Nurbs modeling, so planning to go for Poly or sub-D.

Is there any other way to achieve this. If its require intermediate scripts also, its fine.

Thanx for ur interest.

Regards,
SanthoshG

[Winner]

yes the sytlized feathers in chicken little are extremely well done.

depending on the complexity of your character, the nurbs modeling is fairly simple, so dont worry too much about that ( its just a very`rough` version of your character, that wont be rendered ) you can model the actual rendered character by whatever process you like.

i would try the geometryPaint way, and see what you think. If you dont like that I would try and get hold of `shave and a haircut` - that will probably give you a more professional result, but i am not sure how easy it will be.

[dreamsdestiny]

Dear Winner,

Then its Fine..
I'll achieve thru this method.
Thanks a lot.

Do u have idea to put tutorials for this, else is any site having this.

Regards,
SanthoshG

[Winner]

not sure about tutorials...

[dreamsdestiny]

No probs...Its fine..

[GatorNic]

You can use to the geometryPaint tool to paint geometry onto Polys and Sub-D, not just nurbs

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