Fur problems
 

Hi,

I'm just getting started with Maya and I'm trying to make a furry character using Maya Fur. However, I have a big problem. It seems like the fur doesn't get applied to any of the faces that I've been extruding, and as you can see in the attached file, it makes the model look like crap. I can reproduce this by making a very simple cube and then extruding some faces out of it and try to apply fur, but I'm hoping that something can be done about this so I can make it look good.

Very grateful for help!

try flipping the normals or extracting the extruded parts and attaching the same fur feedback to them.

You need to map the UVs since fur works with the UV coordinates.
Just do automatic mapping before you attach the fur and it should be fine.
Benny

Thanks. After doing an automatic mapping it actually looks right if I check the preview in Maya, but when rendering it looks very weird. The fur only shows up on the back now and still looks weird on arms and ears. Would this be resolved if I just sat down and mapped it all manually?

Can you post a pic of the UV map? Perhaps it's overlaping though I don't think it should with such a simple model.
Anyway, mapping t manually should definitely help but make sure you keep proportions.
Benny

I have to admit, I'm really bad with UV mapping and when I believe I understand the basics, something weird always happens so if I try to map something oblong it still shows up as square in the UV editor. Either way, I decided to take a screenshot showing the persp view (the fur now *seems* to be on most of the body in the persp view), UV editor and a render with an automatic map.

If I need to do it manually, what's the best and/or easiest way to UV map a simple object like this one manually? Should I select the faces for ears, legs, arms, body separately and do cylindrical mapping on all of them?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Hehe, cool sketch :)
If you started with a cylinder then cylindrical mapping should give you pretty good results, but you will still need to take care of the extruded faces.
I don't know why you cant get the fur right though. The automatically mapped UVs should work for fur.
:confused:
I'm out of ideas...
Benny

The problem was that I was using smooth meshed preview (button 3). I had to convert smooth mesh preview to make it work.

Anyway, I've been working a lot on the other parts of the scene now but I'm back to this character again. I'm pretty happy about his fur right now, although there are a few things that I'd like some help with.

http://img68.imageshack.us/img68/753...erjavelfw3.jpg

1) I'm not entirely happy with how his fur is around his mouth, nose and eyes. I'm not really sure how to handle these areas. Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

2) Render times! I have no idea what has happened, but my render times are insane now. Previously it took me about 10 minutes to render with the same settings that now take me one hour and 25 minutes (image above took that long). The only changes I've made are a few minor changes to the model (gave him some claws that I merged in... could that cause some weird issues like this?). Really need to figure this out since I'm doing a uni project here and will have to animate a movie, and with the current render times I wouldn't finish in time even if I was done with everything and could start rendering right now.

Other comments and suggestions would also be appreciated :)

I don't know about the first one, I guess you should make it gradually fade out but I can't help you with how to do that.
As for the render times - Fur is pretty damn heavy so it's natural for render times to go up.
If that's not your final render lower the quality and the resolution so you will save lots of time for the test renders.
Also make sure the render settings aren't too high where they don't need to be.
Benny