Maned Wolf + Experimental Fluff (Patreon)

Turns out my tablet can handle some fur, more or less!

For those of you who don't care about the details of behind the scenes blender stuff, the long and short of it is: I'm messing around with a different way of rendering fur that has some interesting results but I'm not sure yet if it'll be usable. Fur will probably need many tweaks but for now, here it is!

Also, to the monthly animation suggestors among you, she's pretty much ready to go for one of those if you feel like giving her a whirl.

For the people who do care about internal blender stuff:

This character has been all about experimentation. I started by experimenting with anatomy to see if I could push my boundaries in that area a little bit. Mainly dem long ole' legs. I also experimented with my rigging a bit, in fact I built a brand new rig from the ground up so I could try new styles of controls in certain areas and clean up parts of the rig I don't like/don't understand well. I've gone from a complex bone setup for the eyes to just a couple of simple shape keys and I think I might like it better. Very simple. Completely reworked the spine controls as well, and finally have an understanding of what the heck was going on there. I know most of you haven't even seen my rig but the main point is it was a mess before, and now it's better, heh. I experimented with putting the character in an "a" pose instead of a "t" pose by default, as I've heard it can be better to do that. Results will need to wait for animation before I can say for sure, but seems promising so far.

Anyway, in keeping with the experimental nature of this model, I decided to finally try messing with the way I handle fur to see if I can find something I like. Eevee is great for speed, but fur is a fucking disaster in that renderer. It has so many problems- hairs will just change colour depending on which direction you're looking at them, turning very dark when you're looking at angles close to "down the barrel" of the hair, which can create a really ugly, patchy look to characters in certain lighting conditions. It's virtually impossible to get fur to blend in well with the surface material of the character so you need either very long thick hairs (which doesn't always look good) or massive amounts of tiny hairs to cover an area that's supposed to look fairly smooth... which doesn't really work well and slows you right back down anyway. Since I don't want to use so many hairs that my computer chokes to death, that means any kind of extreme close up (kinda popular in filth for some reason, hrmm) looks really nasty, you can see how patchy and thin the fur really looks too well. This same issue also creates really ugly transitions between areas with fur and areas without it, like lips/nips/etc. Basically, fur does weird stuff and doesn't blend in with the 'skin' well which makes it look really ugly in a lot of situations, and you have to use a fuckton of fur which slows things down, and I'm overall starting to get kinda frustrated with it.

Well, I found a method of shading fur that solves pretty much all those issues. I don't know how noticeable any of this will be in just these pictures, but fur looks nice and uniform from all angles, it blends into the body seamlessly so you can use fewer, thicker hairs without it looking chunky and gross, closeups look just fine since you can't see any difference between body and fur, -everything- just works better. It's wonderful. I honestly love the way it smooths everything out, how you can clearly see the fur around her silhouette but it just sorta melts away into the volume of the character. Ideal.

The only downside, and it's a bit of a doozy, is that you lose a ton of shadow detail. The shading is basically just soft cel-shading. Shadows are pretty much either "on" or "off" so you lose a lot of visual information about the shape of the character. This isn't inherently a bad thing, look at any anime and you'll see cel shading everywhere, but it does remove a lot of appealing shadows that show the form of the character. In fact, shadows in general behave kinda strangely and lighting this kind of fur can be difficult. I also have to sacrifice ambient occlusion because it fucks up this fur nastily, though there may be a way to get it back on everything but the character using the compositor.

There is another small downside actually, and that's that she might not fit in more realistic backgrounds, and in 3D it's actually kinda harder to make stylized backgrounds. You can slap a photo of some wood texture into a table-shaped object (for example) and with a little shader fuckery have a fairly realistic table in seconds. Something heavily stylized has to be manually made that way, so if she looks too out of place it could make backgrounds much more of a hassle to create. We'll see.

Anyway, yeah. Experimenting with some shiz. Don't know if it'll stay this way, but man I love the smoother look and the fact I can use like 1/10th the amount of hairs and it still looks good, hah.

In the meantime; Legwolf! Now with fur. What do you think? I'm thinking of making her a nice, short skirt. Seems like her style, and of course if I'm going to give her clothing it might as well emphasize her legs even more, eh?