Shag:Hair - How to paint Fur / Hair (Part 2)

The previous technique is fine and dandy if you have a model with only one surface to deal with or a model that's been uv unwrapped. But what happens if you want to have more than one surface or more than one type of fur on your model? Or you've got a planar project map on an object and you just want to slap fur on either side :) The tutorial shows a technique to handle those situations.

1) Download and unzip the file shag2start.zip. This has a max file with an object / lights / camera setup, and 2 grayscale bitmaps that you'll use for hair placement.

The box object in the scene is an editable mesh that's had its material ID's edited. Everything on the "front" of it is Material ID #1. Everything on the "back" is Material ID #3. It's also got a planar, uvw mapping modifier dropped onto it, projecting straight through the object.

2) Open up Material Editor and make a new Multi/Sub-Object material, calling it "Fur Front/Back" Set its number of Sub-Materials to 4.

a) Call Material #1 “Skin Front.” Set both ambient and diffuse to white. b) Call Material #2 “Fur Front Grayscale.” Add the grayscale bitmap called "front.gif" from the zip file to the diffuse map channel. c) Call Material #3 “Skin Back.” Set both ambient and diffuse to white.

d) Call Material #2 “Fur Back Grayscale.” Add the grayscale bitmap called "back.gif" from the zip file to the diffuse map channel. Go into the bitmaps settings, and in the coordinates panel change the V angle to 180. This will reverse the bitmap, counteracting the effect of the uv mapping currently on the object.

3) Assign this new “Fur Front/Back” Multi/Sub-Object material to the object in the viewport.

4) Go to Rendering>Environment>Atmosphere and add a Shag:Render and a Shag:Fur effect to the atmosphere list. Highlight the Shag:Fur effect to edit it and change it's name to "Fur Front"

6) In the Shag:Fur objects panel, select the object in the viewport as your emitter. You should see a ShagView object appear on it's surface (called SF_Box01_01)

7) In the same objects panel select the "Face Level" button. In the popup that appears, click the Sub-Material ID radio button and leave it at 1. This will limit the fur of this Shag:Fur effect to only the faces that have a sub-material ID set to 1.

8) Move down to the parameters panel, and set the "Density Per Area" value to something pretty dense like 10 (this high value is just to make sure you can clearly see what the fur is doing). 9) Set the Length Maximum to 5, then check the SubMat ID box and set the ID to 2. This tells the fur emitter that it's going to key off material #2 in the Multi/Sub-Object material you created.

10) In Material Editor there should already be a material called "Fur Color 1." Assign this material to the ShagView object you created in the viewport (SF_Box01_01).

You should now have the front of the object furred. Now for the back ...

11) Go to Rendering>Environment>Atmosphere and add a new Shag:Render effect to the atmosphere list. Highlight the Shag:Fur effect to edit it and change it's name to "Fur Back"

12) In the Shag:Fur objects panel, select the object in the viewport as your emitter. You should see a new ShagView object appear on it's back (called SF_Box01_02)

13) As before, select the "Face Level" button. In the popup that appears, click the Sub-Material ID radio button but change the ID to 3. This will limit the fur of this Shag:Fur effect to only the faces that have a sub-material ID set to 3.

14) In the parameters panel, again set the "Density Per Area" value to something pretty dense like 10. 15) Set the Length Maximum to 5, then check the SubMat ID box and set the ID to 4. This tells the fur emitter that it's going to key off material #4 in the Multi/Sub-Object material.

16) In Material Editor there's already a material called "Fur Color 2." Assign this material to the ShagView object you've just created in the viewport (SF_Box01_02).

17) Render Away! (If it all goes horribly wrong, here's the finished file)

You should now see two different furs on the front and back of the object, with the fur length property keyed off of two entirely different bitmaps (the object is already animated, so just slide the time-slider to rotate it and see both sides). As with the previous tutorial this technique also works fine for Shag:Hair too - you'd just need to define Model Hairs for your ShagView object.