Furet Makingof English

8/14/2019 Furet Makingof English

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FerretMaking Of

by Sébastien GAUCHER (seb4d)www.seb4d.fr.st

I used polygon modeling for the body and

started with a simple cube. I made the head

first and tried to create the less faces as pos-

sible or else there would be too much hair

guides and work would be more difficult.

The modeling of the body is quite simple, the

topology is mainly cylindrical and the legs are

extruded from 2 or 3 faces.

It is very important to think about the thick-

ness of the fur when modeling, you have to

make the body thinner than on the reference

photos.

I created this picture with Softimage XSI EXP for the

xsibase’s Hairy Animal contest.

First of all I made some research on google and found

two photos of a ferret, one from the side and one of the

top of the head.



Once the ferret’s body was completed I added some details

on the head like the snout and the mouth. I even modeled the

tongue and teeth while you can’t see them in the final image,

I’m just very maniac lol.

Then I worked on the UVs. In the case

of a hairy animal it is not necessary to be

very precise because you won’t see texture

stretching, but it can help to control the

color of the fur.

I divided the mesh into several clusters to

which I applied sub-projections in the UV

Editor.

Once completed I exported the UVs to

photoshop (menu Edit>Stamp UV Mesh).

To create the texture I used the reference photos. No

need to be very precise once again. This map will be

used for the fur color and also for the skin.



Now that the modeling phase is finished I applied

the fur. You can do it in two different ways : you

can create a hair operator for each cluster of the

body or you creat a single hair operator for the

entire body.

I chose the second method because of one reason

: when rendering fur, xsi interpolates the position

and orientation of hair strands

between the hair guides, which

result in a perfect continuity. If

you create several hair operators

the continuity will be broken at

the intersection of the clusters

and you’ll see seams. To avoid

that I create a single cluster for

each part of the body that neededfur, so excluding the snout,

mouth, claws and eyes.

Then you have to style the hair. I

first used the Comb tool to give

the fur a main direction along

the body, then I used the Scale

tool, finally I shaped each hair

guide by moving the tip. This is a long but essen-

tial step.

The fur on the head is very short compared to the body, as well as the paws and ears. When you

shape the hair guides try to curl their tip a bit so

that the fur will be a bit bristly. I also made sure

to give the tail enough volume.

Once this long step completed I still had to create the moustache. To

do that I duplicated the ferret mesh and deleted all the faces apart from

those on which are the moustache. Then in the Visibility property I

unchecked the primary and secondary rendering. Finally I applied to it

a new hair operator and tweaked the guides to get this nice moustache !



Now I converted the polygon meshes into subdiv,

very easy : hit the + key (thanks xsi !!).

The problem is that the fur is no longer lying onthe body. You have to tell xsi to take into acount

the subdiv level. I selected the hair and opened

the Hair Generator Operator property page. Their

I setup the Subd Level to be the same as the ferret

mesh.

Then I opened the Hair property page.

I choosed Volume as render type.

This model needs a lot of hairs so I typed 200,000 int Total

Hairs. This gives a very thick fur, but it also slows down

rendering time.

I made some tests with Hair Multiplier but I though it was

useless because of the Total Hairs I chose.But in order to reduce render time I changed Hair Segments

from 10 to 5 which is sufficient for this kind of fur.



I didn’t change much in the Effect tab.

The most important is to find the right values for the

thickness of the hair strands. It all depends on the scaleof the scene.

The thicker the fur is, the more you can see through it.

So I made many tests between the Thickness value and

Total Hairs in order to to get a thin but dense fur.

Then I added a little randomness in the scale of the fur

to make it more natural.

Finally the last step : the hair shader !

Ambiant color was set very dark to get a.... dark

fur lol.

Then I plugged the texture map I created in pho-

toshop into the Root Color and Tip Color A. Tip

Color B was set to a very dark color too, then Imixed the A and B Tip Color together.

I also adjusted the crossover between the Root

and Tip color : Center means when the hair strand

changes from root to tip color, Range corresponds

to the kind of transition (smooth or linear or no

transition at all...it depends on the value you set).

Finally I chose not to give too much specularity to

the fur.



In the Transparency tab I changed the param-eters like this.

The hair strands being rather thin this was not

necessary to make the tips really transparent. A

value of 0 for Root Tip helps to make a dense

fur.

Here is the texture map plugged into Root and

Tip Color and used with the ferret’s UVs.

To sum up with the shader, here is the RenderTree. As you can see a single texture map is used for two colors.



Once the rendering was good for

me, I created a skeleton and bound

the mesh to it.

Here is the pose I chose to give to

my ferret ! I was inspired by a photo

of a stuffed ferret lol.



And now the very last step before final rendering :

lighting !

Nothing complicated here, I used 4 infinite lights.

key light : main light casting shadows

fill light : secondary light

back light : light coming from behind

rim light : to create this rim around the mesh

I didn’t used GI or Final Gathering because this isvery time consuming.

And here is the result !This image still could be enhanced but I didn’t have more time to work on it.

http://www.seb4d.fr.st [email protected]

Furet Makingof English

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