Chapter 15: Fur, Hair, and Clothing

Add fur to characters. Maya Fur is a rendering module that adds realistic short hairs to the surface of characters to simulate fur. Fur can be rendered using both Maya Software and mental ray. The placement, length, and other attributes of fur can be controlled by painting on the surface with the Artisan tool interface. When adding fur to polygons, the success of the fur is largely dependent on how well the UV texture coordinates have been mapped.

Master It Create furry whiskers for the giraffe model used in Chapter 11.

Solution Open the giraffeUV_v07.ma scene from the chapter11\scenes directory on the DVD. Attach fur to the model, and paint a baldness map so that nonwhiskered areas are at a value of 0 and whiskered areas have a low value, such as 0.3, to create sparse whiskers.