More experiments in sculpted fur (Patreon)

As some of you may remember, early on in my 3D modelling career I started without particle based fur for a variety of reasons- I just didn't think it looked all that great, and my computer couldn't handle it at the time anyway.

My computer can now handle it, and I have improved enough at styling particles to make the fur look alright so I switched over to it, but I still find myself a little frustrated with it. It leads to silly render times such that people with more reasonable computers couldn't hope to use my models, and tends to look bad everywhere that doesn't involve long flowy tufts. Those look pretty good, but smoother areas often look pretty rough, and in styles I prefer, most of the character is made up of those smoother areas.

So why use particles at all? Well, because fur styles that don't use particles tend to look even -worse-. I've pretty much never seen a 3D model with sculpted fur that really did it for me. Most furry 3D models don't even bother and just kind of look like rubber, and the few that try a little tend to look just like spikes or something. Rubber spikes. It's iffy.

But if I could find a method of doing sculpted fur that looked good, it would open up a lot of options and solve a lot of problems, so every once in a while I sit down and mess with it. After some research and a lot of fiddling with sculpting methods, I came up with this... this is a very rough sculpt, the body is just yoinked from an existing model and not fixed up for this experiment so you can ignore that, we're mainly looking at the fur for now. It's also obviously not coloured, properly texturing the body would allow me to further blend clumps of fur in with non-fluffy areas and make things look even better, but I have to say for an early experiment... I'm kinda digging it? I'm thinking I might push forward with this and see how it looks retopologized and textured and stuff. It takes for-fucking-ever to sculpt fur like this, but the time would be recovered on the rendering side pretty quickly, and close-up shots wouldn't be as out-of-the-question.

Models with fur rendered in this fashion could also be used in game engines, so things like VR chat and smut games would be an option, unlike current models. So I'd be curious to hear what you think of this sort of style for furry characters, such as it is in this currently rough state!