Welcome to this V-Ray feature short demonstration. In this video, we'll take a closer look
at the "VRayFur" and how we can use it to create procedural fur and grass using the GPU.
In this scene, we have an environment containing a field and a donkey character.
We are going to use "VRayFur" to create character's fur and the grass for the field.
Let's open up the render settings and make sure that "ActiveShade" is set to V-Ray RT.
We'd like to render on the GPU. For NVIDIA GPUs, it is recommended to render with the
"CUDA" engine type, so let's choose that option and click the render button.
Let's select the character and apply the "VRayFur" modifier.
By default, the fur is equally distributed over the whole object and also has a random color assigned to it.
We can assign a material to the "VRayFur" modifier. Let's assign a "VRayHair"
material which I have prepared earlier. You can find out more information on how to set up
the hair material in the "Displacement and Hair" tutorial.
Next, let's tweak the fur modifier parameters so we can achieve the look we desire.
They have self-explanatory names. For instance, the "length" controls the length of the
fur strands and so on. Let's adjust the "length" to 5cm and set the "thickness" to 0.08cm.
Since we are trying to create hair strands we should taper the top end of each
hair strand. Let's set the "taper" to 0.9.
Once we are happy with the basic parameters, we can introduce some variation in the direction
or the length of the fur. Let's set the "length variation" to 0.6.
In the distribution section, we can control the density of the fur spread throughout the
object. We can choose between "per face" and "per area" distribution. If we choose
"per face" we can specify how many hair strands to generate for each individual face
of the object. If we choose the "per area" option we can specify the number of strands .
per squared scene units.
In the placement section, we can choose if
only the selected faces will generate fur or all of the faces. In this particular example,
we want all of the faces to generate fur so let's leave the placement at the "entire object" option.
We could also introduce a little bit of waviness in the fur by activating the "curl" option.
By tweaking the "curl radius" and the "number of curls" we can control how curly the fur would appear.
Finally, we can plug in textures into the map slots to control all of the parameters
we've covered earlier. For instance, the head of the character should have shorter
fur length compared to other parts of the character. We can control that by painting
custom texture and plug it into the length map slot.
I have prepared a couple of such textures for the length and the thickness of the fur.
It's a simple greyscale texture where white color would be the maximum length amount (5cm in this example)
and black color would be 0cm. All of the greyscale values would represent length between 0 and 5 cm.
Let's plug the texture into the length map slot, also let's do the same for the thickness texture.
Using the same method, I have created the hair for the mane and the tail of the character
as well as the grass on the field. In cases
where we need to generate a large area of fur such as a grass field, we can use the level of detail
optimization to free up system resources. It's located under the geometric detail section.
Simply tick the "level of detail" checkbox and adjust the "start distance" and "rate parameters".
The "start distance" measures the distance from which V-Ray is going to
start implementing the level of detail, and the "rate" parameter controls the rate
at which the detail adjustment is applied.
In this video, we went over the "VRayFur" modifier. We have covered how we can use it
to generate hair, fur and grass objects and render them using the GPU.
I hope you have found this video useful and helpful. Please give us your feedback, comment,
or share it. If you'd like to follow along this tutorial, please download the scene from
the video provided in the video's description. Make sure you check out more of the V-Ray
feature video and be on the lookout for new ones.
Thank you for watching.