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[Raxx]

[johnar]

 Hi there Raxx.  This is awesome. I added phur to unsubdivided mesh, converted phur to mesh and then 'joined solids'. Now it sticks to animations. Have done a couple of tests on springy. Unable to post an animated gif, but have put a very short clip on youtube.

 Rendered very quickly.

 Will keep playing with this and keep you posted as i discover new things.....
 Really cool plugin. 

[lppena]

Very cool bro, and thanks for posting the script. Leroy.

[cooldude234]

Very cool bro, and thanks for posting the script. Leroy.

I thought you were going to say "cool story bro"

Good job on the script rax, this should hopefully make it easier to use than the previous fur script
Haven't downloaded it yet, but does it allow deconstruction of the generated fur (IE if you apply the fur, can you unapply the fur), if not do you have plans to do this(because that's one thing I hate with a lot of the scripts with anim8or)?

[Raxx]

Glad you guys like it!

johnar, nice to see Springy growing some Phur

lppena, you're welcome, and thanks

cooldude234, one of the great things about parametric shape scripts is that it's pretty versatile compared to regular command scripts (I'm guessing those are what you're referring to). I made PHUR so that if you're tired of looking at the fur, you can apply a dummy material to it and it'll revert back to the frowny face after you OK it. It'll retain all of the settings, and to restore it just reapply the original material to it again. Alternatively, you can just select it and hide it if you want to work on the base mesh(es) again. Lastly, you could just apply a different material (be it a copy or otherwise) to whatever face or mesh you want to unapply the fur.

Another advantage to PHUR being a parametric shape is that the file size imprint is close to nil if you save it without converting to mesh. The file only saves the parameters, not the mesh generated!

[edit] By the way, attached is an example of multiple materials w/ fur on one mesh, kind of neglected to show it in action

I'm going to go ahead and update to v1.1. New features:

• Option to make height/width variation based on mesh density or random factor
• A few more falloff types for geometric PHUR. Still a bit rough around the edges
• Strand falloff can now be weighted

Please read the documentation to see the changes that were made since the last release. This script is almost done...just gotta implement combing capability and give better falloffs.

[cooldude234]

That is great Raxx
This for sure will add a lot of stuff to anim8or!

[Raxx]

I hope so, though honestly most of the artists here won't need fur, since most prefer inorganic modeling. I tend towards organic though, and had been wanting to make a fur script for a while now (to make a realistic squirrel, of all things). Anyway, after this who knows. Trees, grass, and foliage?

Update to v1.2! Includes comb capability and progress bar in the console. I'm rather proud of the comb thing, it's about the best I can do given ASL's current limitations.

By the way, I forgot to mention that all the fur strands are UV mapped so that it unfolds across the texture (cylindrical for the geometric type, and planar for the transmap type).

I plan on just a few more features after this, the documentation is all updated. I also removed most of the images since it was getting too cluttered.

[johnar]

 I just want to say, don't leave town in the next few days, theres  a friend or 2 of mine that want to say thank you. 

[captaindrewi]

Medal and hall of fame Raxx, having fun here.

[kreator]

Another Good Job Raxx, couple of tests with Ted:








Different Fur lengths and depths. If I crank down the distance it takes a phenomenal amount of time locking up the machine with only one core, will try on my quad core at home.

Does it use a transmap material if I use  3 and above in phut type   

[Raxx]

Glad you guys are trying it out! I discovered a major bug with the comb thing--I kind of broke it in one of my last minute changes before updating -- I uploaded v1.2a with the fix!

kreator, good to see you stress testing PHUR! 3 and higher reverts to a transmap shape only. I know this causes potential problems with the base mesh, as far as I can tell you have two options: Convert to mesh and apply a transmap material separate from the base mesh, or give the base mesh a huge-scaled planar uv map so that a completely opaque part of the transmap covers all of it. I prefer the latter option unless the base mesh is already unwrapped and needs its own texture.

The same idea applies to geometric fur as well, since you could have potential conflicts if you want to use a texture map on the fur strands (my minotaur uses gradient color maps mixed with some ambient color). You'd have to either convert to mesh or scale the base mesh's UVs to a location on the map that has a suitable color, unless the base mesh looks good enough as is.

The more realistic or in-depth you want the PHUR, the more thoughtful you'll have to be. If you take the time to create a base mesh that you are happy with, and take the time to comb the PHUR how you want it, then there won't be much preventing you from finalizing it by converting it to mesh and then customizing the materials. However(!), if you really like your PHUR and want to back it up just in case, simply copy and paste it and the combs into a separate object before converting the PHUR to mesh and deleting the combs. Like I said before, the .an8 file size imprint is extremely small for parametric shapes, so there's no reason not to.

I know I'm kind of rambling now but I also noticed that Anim8or does its general processing with only one thread. So you need a fast core to reduce the generation time, and more than one core if you don't want to lock up your entire computer until it's done. I'll be emailing Steve a list of ASL requests, and multithreading is going to be one of them.

captaindrewi: I'd forgotten about the more abstract. Good to see you using it in style

johnar, thanks, but I may end up vanishing just like tha- *poof*

[Raxx]

Guess what I just implemented in the new release?

[cooldude234]

Multiple, randomized meshes?

[Raxx]

Kind of. You can define your own fur strand(s). If you have more than one then it'll randomly choose between whatever's there. You can use combs or random bending, falloff, etc just like with the other PHUR types.

Using high-res meshes does take a while to generate though. The minotaurs in that image took about 30 minutes to generate, and Anim8or took hours to render it. It resulted in almost 700k polygons, so I guess the generation time is sort of understandable.

(BTW I tested it with RIBRobin->3Delight  and it renderered in less than 5 minutes)

[cooldude234]

I have a technical question raxx, what algorithm/formula did you use to distribute the meshes onto the surface of the polygons (I've been trying to figure out how to do that for distributing grass in my engine at run time)?