fur color
 

hello again to everyone!

I have been at this 3d thing for about 3 years now and really have exploded in the last year (as I now have a job that allows me to sleep for 35 of my work hours).

anyway I have many projects that I have started and dropped and they have served me well for experiencing issues that I would not have even considered to learn workarounds for.

however when I am able to do something at some point and then not recreate it later no matter what I do, it drives me mad.

any rate I am now working on a realistic giraffe (as it is my 3yr old daughter's favorite animal) too late for long story short, but I am trying to set the fur color by using the same file that is my texture color (giraffe spots & such).

so I have mapped that file into:
base color, tip color, base ambient, tip ambient, and specular color.

I have also tried a render in between assigning each one. but no matter what I try I just get a render with black fur.

I have also tried creating a directional light at different settings.
tried mental ray and software renders.

I also tried setting up a new scene and used a polySphere and a different color map but no matter what ... black fur.

does anyone have any guesses as to what I did before that I am not doing now?

I have always admired the work posted here and the willingness to help by the people here.
Infinite thanks.

without the fur attached to the model does the render of the giraffe show its spots correctly?

yes actually it does. but without the fur it looks like a toy giraffe.:headbang:

Hey there leotikansas,

I made THIS tutorial a while back to explain simply how to map attributes in fur.

Hopefully you might find something useful in it.

Take it easy,

Mat.

I am embarassed to say that I simply forgot to press the bake button.#@$%#@!!!!

so this is just for test fur as my modeling is not really done yet.
I have one directional light overhead and one spotlight behind the camera and the default light is disabled in render settings.

but for some wierd? reason the underside fur is highlighted.

without the fur attached these areas are BLACK.

my ambient colors are black...what might I be missing this time?

do you have 'enable default light' turned off?

yes default light is off.. I thought of that.

Often a new light is created with the fur, it could be that.... you can see a directional light is created with the duck fur example I used on the tutoriall..... check the outliner or hypergraph for any lights that you've not created yourself, they could be child of the fur node.

Good luck,

Mat :)