The application of separate material to a fur material is not responding as anticipated. ie. texture maps do not appear on the fur strips only solid colour. I am assuming I would create the applied material to fit a surface 1x1 parametrically so it sits on each fur strand.
It seems to work fine in the material preview, but fail in a render...
Hi Robert,
You create a material for the base (dirt) and pick a separate defined material for the strands, for instance you could pick one of the grass materials from our library for the strands. You can experiment wit the mapping units but we don't yet have a way to map a texture to each strand. I can see how that would be cool, we will add this to our to do list.
JF
hmm.... looking at this again I guess I steered you wrong. What you want is exactly what we do. If you create a material for the fur strand using a single blade of grass even with ragged tip using alpha it should map correctly.
This is too easy that is why it it seem so hard ;-)
Create a material for the grass to grow on (dirt), then create a material for the grass blade or better yet blades of grass with some alpha for transparency, you know the drill surface mapping 1:1. You then apply this to as the separate fur material. Now as I discovered this has far reaching implications as you should be able create a texture with multiple strands and then use less geometry. I did see some problem when I applied this to a large bspline surface, I get no fur, so I will need to try and get this sorted out but you should be able to get idea from the attached file.
Okay on further review I found that the underlying base material mapping needs to set to set to units such as meters as it controls how much area to cover. When I created the base material in the attached file I used a color and did not set the mapping mode. This by the way looked okay on most of the smaller widgets, you will see a problem using the park scene. Just change the ground material to cover 1 x 1 meter or larger and this should work on the larger surface.
Have Fun
Whoo Hoo! It works but,
I am using a pattern map and a mask map for the base texture.
If I use the mask as an alpha mask in the pattern map it takes forever to render. (15 min)
If I use the same mask in as a transparency map it is much quicker. (2 min)
In both cases I'm getting a wierd specular highlight on my materials. I've seen this before on mask/transparency. I expect this to happen using a tranparency mask, but surely if some thing is masked there should be no specular highlight in the masked areas? Do I need to set my specular map = mask map?
Yes you do...
Specular map = transparency map. (2 min)