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Fur?...already?
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Fur?...already? // Roundtable
Post by splinters // Jul 6, 2006, 7:35am
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splinters
Total Posts: 4148
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Not to cast aspersions on the source of this image, but the fur in the still gallery entry by mathijs v/d Poel is pretty damn good. I am not aware of fur of this quality in TS yet...so just how did he do it....:rolleyes: |
Post by hemulin // Jul 6, 2006, 7:55am
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hemulin
Total Posts: 1058
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Hmm, looks too good to be post-process, Is it too good for the hair plugin? Is there another hair plugin out there that we aren't aware of? |
Post by splinters // Jul 6, 2006, 7:58am
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splinters
Total Posts: 4148
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If the plug in is that good...I really ought to mess with it a bit more but I fear not..:cool: |
Post by TomG // Jul 6, 2006, 10:10am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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According to the details on the submission, this was done following a grass tutorial for tS, with textures painted in Photoshop placed onto NURBS spheres. The artist themselves would be best to comment of course :)
But it looks like no, no plug-in, just creativity, cleverness, and good ol effort, and a very impressive result!
Although I am sure the fur planned for the tS7.5 release will make things more of a "one click" operation, this does just show that a lot can be achieved if you put your mind to it. As they always have said, "it's the artist, not the software, that determines what can be done"
That won't stop us trying to make it easier for the artist to do what they want to do though :)
HTH!
Tom |
Post by frootee // Jul 7, 2006, 11:37am
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frootee
Total Posts: 2667
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Hi folks.
Tom: Regarding the hair/fur capability in ts 7.5, is this something that can be created with ts 7.5 alone, or is Vray required? Currently I do not have vray.
thanks,
jason |
Post by TomG // Jul 7, 2006, 11:54am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Everything is still under development, so I can't give you exact features for exact set-ups. The plan is though that fur and hair will be available under more than just V-Ray. Whether it will be identical, or the same system, or as good as, or different render engines with different features, etc, I can't say, and this isn't a cast iron guarantee of what will come out.
So, all that usual "words of warning" aside, the good news is that it is being worked on for more than just V-Ray :)
HTH!
Tom |
Post by frootee // Jul 7, 2006, 2:24pm
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frootee
Total Posts: 2667
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Thank You Tom. I am not very much up to speed on hair/grass/fur type technologies, so please bear with me there. I need to read up on that! :-D
I thought that hair was more of a modelling type of technology, rather than being dependent upon a rendering/lighting technology. Hence my need to eddikate myself.
In any event, hair and fur for other rendering engines sounds really swell.
Thanks!
Jason |
Post by TomG // Jul 10, 2006, 4:56am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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There are several different approaches to hair and fur, but generally they are not geometry based. Geometry would be incredibly slow to create, and to render, and then would be tricky to animate.
Usually the solution is a post-process one, where the surface normals are passed to the hair / fur generator. Some "guide hairs" are usually defined (though those are not geometry either, just controls to let you define some "sample hairs" as I understand it). THe rest of the hairs are then calculated from that.
Note that as post-process, some hair / fur systems do not show up in reflections or refraction, for instance (since at the point of calculating reflection, the hair / fur does not exist yet). That was certainly true of some pro level hair fur when I was looking into it several years back. Don't know about now.
I think there are other approaches to hair now too, things like volume shaders and stuff. Even then though, it is not geometry based, though then it isn't post process either.
I am no hair fur expert - since I mainly make objects rather than characters, it hasn't been a major issue for me ;)
HTH!
Tom |
Post by Johny // Jul 10, 2006, 8:33am
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Johny
Total Posts: 672
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Here's my experiment to fake fur with tS. rendered with lightworks HDRI. |
Post by Paul Boland // Jul 11, 2006, 7:40am
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Paul Boland
Total Posts: 383
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Johny, how did you do that?
And can it be done in TrueSpace 5.1? |
Post by Bobbins // Jul 11, 2006, 8:41am
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Bobbins
Total Posts: 506
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The usual trick is to make a transparency map with lots of little dots in it, then apply that to the object.
Make a copy of the object and enlarge it along the object normals a tiny amount.
Keep repeating so you have a lot of copies of the object in shells like an onion skin.
The dots on the transparency map line up and look like rods when rendered - it's an old trick and you can do it in pretty much any version of tS. |
Post by Johny // Jul 11, 2006, 10:30am
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Johny
Total Posts: 672
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The usual trick is to make a transparency map with lots of little dots in it, then apply that to the object.
Make a copy of the object and enlarge it along the object normals a tiny amount.
Keep repeating so you have a lot of copies of the object in shells like an onion skin.
The dots on the transparency map line up and look like rods when rendered - it's an old trick and you can do it in pretty much any version of tS.
That's the answer :)
I use that trick. |
Post by splinters // Jul 11, 2006, 1:41pm
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splinters
Total Posts: 4148
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Damn, I wish I could code...that fur looks great-I would be more than happy with that in TS7.5...:) |
Post by hemulin // Jul 12, 2006, 1:31am
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hemulin
Total Posts: 1058
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It looks very interesting, if tS7.5 is going to be able to do this sort of stuff with ease, I am happy. |
Post by Asem // Jul 12, 2006, 5:56am
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Asem
Total Posts: 255
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It seems that you are provided with the connectors like the eye matrix, normal and stuff and you create an hlsl bock that takes in those values to do the calculations on to be outputted to the final shader. Like you Emma I'm still trying to figure this out since it is different than writing it in pure hlsl but , if my reasoning makes since, and it seems confused. :confused:
Johnny nice looking fur. |
Post by Délé // Jul 12, 2006, 10:17am
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Délé
Total Posts: 1374
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Thanks for the link Emma! It looks very useful. :) It's good to see that there are a few good minds trying to crack HLSL in TS7. I think many good things will come as a result. :) |
Post by Johny // Jul 12, 2006, 5:39pm
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Johny
Total Posts: 672
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Here is another cool fur example code from ATI site :banana: http://www.ati.com/developer/samples/3rdparty/tomohide_fur.03.13.02.zip |
Post by Paul Boland // Jul 13, 2006, 7:36am
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Paul Boland
Total Posts: 383
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The usual trick is to make a transparency map with lots of little dots in it, then apply that to the object.
Make a copy of the object and enlarge it along the object normals a tiny amount.
Keep repeating so you have a lot of copies of the object in shells like an onion skin.
The dots on the transparency map line up and look like rods when rendered - it's an old trick and you can do it in pretty much any version of tS.
Thanks for the info. |
Post by Steinie // Jul 14, 2006, 1:24am
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Steinie
Total Posts: 3667
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Not to cast aspersions on the source of this image, but the fur in the still gallery entry by mathijs v/d Poel is pretty damn good. I am not aware of fur of this quality in TS yet...so just how did he do it....:rolleyes:
Well I talked to Mathijs v/d Poel and this is part of his email....
"First I created a hair "rail" with the help of Photoshop with the standard brush to create the transparency map. I then opened it in trueSpace and used it as a transmap. Then I created very many Nurbs planes and wrapped it around the very simple sphere (basically)."
I am not 100% sure how this was done. Can someone here demonstrate more clearly how he did this? I really liked his results and thank him for taking the time to help. |
Post by Bobbins // Jul 14, 2006, 1:40am
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Bobbins
Total Posts: 506
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The usual trick is to make a transparency map with lots of little dots in it, then apply that to the object.
Make a copy of the object and enlarge it along the object normals a tiny amount.
Keep repeating so you have a lot of copies of the object in shells like an onion skin.
The dots on the transparency map line up and look like rods when rendered - it's an old trick and you can do it in pretty much any version of tS.
I think what he's describing is much the same as I mention above. I don't quite get the part about wrapping Nurbs planes around a sphere: that doesn't make sense and to get the complexity of hair his image shows would require a lot of different transparency maps.
The best person to fully describe how it was done is Mathijs - his e-mail is very, very sparse on the actual details. |
Post by ProfessorKhaos // Jul 14, 2006, 2:39am
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ProfessorKhaos
Total Posts: 622
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I think rather than stacking layers of dots and mapping them to several increasingly small but duplicate objects for depth, he's likely painting a hair pattern from the side (rather than a cross section from above), placing the nurbs planes around the original sphere such that one edge of the plane is in contact with the sphere's surface (hair root) and the other edge represents the tips of the hair away from the sphere. The use of nurbs planes allows you to wrap the UV map around curves easier such that the hair looks properly stretched. Nurbs also gives you a relatively easy ability to simulate gravity by bending the "tips" downward.
Quite a bit of work no matter how you look at it though. |
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