Day 142

Before starting another book, I decided to do a quick lesson on using fur. This is from one of Maya's short online lessons. Above is the teddy bear they provided for me.

I could build fur from scratch and manipulate all the variables to get the look I want. However, Maya has a lot of built in templates of different types of animal fur that can be further tweaked. So I placed one of those on the bear on the left. On the right, I changed the direction of the fur so the hairs are pointing in the right direction.

 

Then I changed the color of the fur and added in some whiskers using the preset for porcupine hair. Lastly, I set up some cameras and turned on some shadow effects and rendered out the bear below. It looks fairly impressive considering how little work was actually involved. I will find out how difficult fur can really be soon enough.