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Geometry Nodes Fur Setup!
2 years ago
General
Well, I think it's ready! This is my brainchild as a result of the last couple of weeks/months, depending on how you look at it. Nice to finally, hopefully be done with it!
This one is something 99% of you aren't gonna care about; if you're not actively making models in blender right now there's not much here for you. But if you are and you've been wanting to test out a fur style similar to mine, these nodes will give you all the tools you need to do it. There's a node setup for transferring normals and colours from the body to fur, and a node setup for scattering fur across a surface that's compatible with a hacky way to get physics into curves-based hair, since the current and near-future fur scattering methods aren't.
You can find the download link here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/geome.....nodes-80457212 IT'S NOT PAYWALLED, that's just a convenient place for me to host it. But I certainly wouldn't mind if you did decide to toss a few dollarydoos my way if you appreciate all the hard work that went into making this. :P Not necessary though!
Note, normal transferring currently only works in eevee, you'll get weird artifacts in cycles!
Honestly, you only really need to use my fur scattering system on hair setups that need physics; for the rest of the body you can just use whatever method of combing curve-based fur you like. But what I've got here is actually quite usable for general combing over the whole body if I do say so myself. You can use it to stylize fur over the whole character's body and just apply it (and then re-add a geometry nodes modifier with a "Deform curves on surface" node) anywhere you don't need physics.
If you -do- need physics, the setup will seem pretty fiddly at first, but once you go over the steps a few times it's not so bad.
If you try this out and run into trouble... well, firstly just go over the directions carefully, there's a lot here and it's easy to mess up. But if you try a few times and can't get it working, let me know and I'll see if I can help. It's very possible I messed up something in the directions and need to re-write some stuff. If you manage to make anything cool with this setup, show me, I'd love to see! :D
This one is something 99% of you aren't gonna care about; if you're not actively making models in blender right now there's not much here for you. But if you are and you've been wanting to test out a fur style similar to mine, these nodes will give you all the tools you need to do it. There's a node setup for transferring normals and colours from the body to fur, and a node setup for scattering fur across a surface that's compatible with a hacky way to get physics into curves-based hair, since the current and near-future fur scattering methods aren't.
You can find the download link here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/geome.....nodes-80457212 IT'S NOT PAYWALLED, that's just a convenient place for me to host it. But I certainly wouldn't mind if you did decide to toss a few dollarydoos my way if you appreciate all the hard work that went into making this. :P Not necessary though!
Note, normal transferring currently only works in eevee, you'll get weird artifacts in cycles!
Honestly, you only really need to use my fur scattering system on hair setups that need physics; for the rest of the body you can just use whatever method of combing curve-based fur you like. But what I've got here is actually quite usable for general combing over the whole body if I do say so myself. You can use it to stylize fur over the whole character's body and just apply it (and then re-add a geometry nodes modifier with a "Deform curves on surface" node) anywhere you don't need physics.
If you -do- need physics, the setup will seem pretty fiddly at first, but once you go over the steps a few times it's not so bad.
If you try this out and run into trouble... well, firstly just go over the directions carefully, there's a lot here and it's easy to mess up. But if you try a few times and can't get it working, let me know and I'll see if I can help. It's very possible I messed up something in the directions and need to re-write some stuff. If you manage to make anything cool with this setup, show me, I'd love to see! :D
THANKS!!!
(Now i gotta see if Grant Abbitt has a tutorial about nodes)
The current model:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/50714589/
Next model (Practice)
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/33563173/
I think once I have these two as examples I an ethically ask for commissions after that.
Clothing will be a separate issue.
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/51530078/
Oh, actually one thing; this is less a criticism and more a style choice, but you can disable shadow casting on the fur material and ambient occlusion in the render properties panel if you want the fur to blend in more seamlessly with the body. But there's certainly no necessity to do either if you want the fur to stick out a bit more!
Keep up the fantastic work :D
Using a vertex group and the clumping option to blend in some clumping around the cheeks/mane would probably be a nice touch, but otherwise I'd say you're doing good!
I saw on one of your new character posts that it would render in just a few seconds... I'm still struggling with render speeds. This linked post took about 30-40 seconds to render? I've tried reducing the amount of curves but then the model looks rather scraggly. I'm curious how you manage such quick render times while ensuring adequate coverage?
One strange optimization you can make, is that some of the nodes that my fur system depends on have a weird quirk where they operate faster if the UV map they're tied to is smaller. You can create a duplicate of whatever UV map your curves are using, set them to use this duplicate, and then scale it down to 1/4 size- you'll then also need to go through and cut your "scatter distance" in the geonodes modifier down to 1/4th whatever it was as well. (again, might need to do the curves > snap to surface thing after scaling the UV map) While this probably won't create a tremendous difference, I've usually been able to cut a second or two off my render times by doing this, it's fast and easy and you only have to do it once so it's worth it.
Could also be hardware- I render with a pretty meaty setup, if you're using something that doesn't have much power it could be bogging down a little.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head, without having the model on hand to poke around a bit and see if I can root anything else out. :P
As for changing length, you can just do that while you're in sculpt mode with the length brush. The vast majority of length detail should be done in sculpt mode. There's a vertex group for length but that's mainly for "just in case" purposes, if some artist has some idea for it that I didn't think of.
Still no idea what's going on with the undeletable hairs though, that's weird. x3 I haven't encountered that particular issue myself except for when hairs were unselected, so no idea what else could do that.
Thank you for sharing this, and thank you for your willingness to let me bother you for help! It's really appreciated, and a really awesome node setup.