FURRRRRR BRRRRRR!!!!

As we decided to use fur on two characters- the bee and fly- I needed to study fur in Maya a bit. Its really complicated to match it perfectly with the mesh! UV mapping of the model needs to be perfect in order for fur to work.

BEE FUR

Iris the Bee has 3 different colours of fur. I spent ages doing proper UV mapping her,because apparently fur is connected with the texture even after deleting the texture and mesh history.

To get 3 color fur you need to extract the mesh, otherwise it doesn't work as as soon as you move something on the mesh (combining, moving vertices,...) the fur disappears.

Here are some very nice Maya Fur Tutorials:

http://www-viz.tamu.edu/courses/tutorials/rlogan/present/fur_pres.html

http://www.digitaltutors.com/store/product.php?productid=20

there is a possibility of achieving very nice fur looks with BUMP MAPPING in Z Brush:



But this is very time consuming, thats why we decided to go for Maya preset fur and adjust it the way we want.

I found this absolutely dreadful example of Maya fur fun, but different options of fur adjustments on one same model can be seen. This wolf is an example of bad UV mapping(squares on the back part).

Texturing

I thought this part would be easier. I had an idea of texturing those insects as they are hand drawn. I was trying to use some parts of drawings I made for character desing and to recreate some of them with help of graphic tablet- in Photoshop. It didnt really work when I attached them, because the resolution of thextures have to be quite high - 1024 x 1024 to get soe nice renders. In praxis that means that I had to do very precise UV mapping, do UV SNAPSHOTS, print them out and draw very huge textures: