I'm using Maya 6 Unlimited to build a cat, complete with fur. I'm using GI_Joe to light it, which might be related to my problems.... the black parts of the fur look great, but the white parts look awful. Too shiny, and it's obviously disconnected from the mesh at points.

Any suggestions?

Aja

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Well, okay, so if white fur doesn't look good, don't use white fur.

So now my problem is the really annoying gap between the mesh and the fur on places like the legs. It happens with both white and black fur, and changing the offset value of the fur to -.1 only makes the fur look shorter, it doesn't change the gap at all.

Man, fur sure is a headache! I may just end up with a bald little kitty if I can't get this to look decent. :p

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I think the problem with the white fur probably has to do with lighting.

I've not messed with fur enough to know why the gap is there.

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

Thanks for the tips!

After a lot of troubleshooting and endless hours rendering, I've narrowed down the causes of a lot of these problems.

Too-bright fur: Lighting and shadowing, obviously. I needed to add Fur Shadowing attributes to all my lights, and adjust the self shade and self shade darkness sliders until the fur wasn't too bright or too dark. Using 32 GI_Joe lights, I ended up with about .3 self shade and .8 self shade darkness. YMMV. I also played around a lot with the specular settings, there are lots of them on the fur attributes and on the lights. I'm still not thrilled with the lighting on the fur, but it's not nearly so distracting.

Gap between fur and skin: D'oh! It took me forever to realize this was a problem with my UVs. Fur is unbelievably sensitive about UV mapping, and if you have ANY overlapping or pinching at all, bad stuff happens. I'm slowly going through and tweaking my UVs, and the gaps are going away.

Patches of baldness: Again, UV overlapping. Currently, the only baldness I have left is on the cat's shoulders, where I still have some overlapping faces. When I fix those, I expect fur to grow normally there.

Whew! This has been quite an exercise for me. Especially given I just started learning UV unwrapping a few days ago.

Well, I think I'm finally starting to make some progress on getting fur on this cat. It's still growing in places in the mouth, and the fur could use some combing, but this is lightyears better than where I was last week!

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lol from that view it looks like a possum doll.

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Great job so far, I couldn't get close to that, but it does look like he's spent a few hours in the dryer; has a few split ends :p

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