Paint Fur Density

Interactively changes the amount of fur by painting your geometry.

See also: Fur, Paint

This tool is useful for interactively modifying the amount of fur. It allows you to manually paint the density of fur on the skin geometry. Varying the fur density will allow you to determine which areas have dense clumps of fur as well as areas that have relatively thin coverage.

After adding fur with the Add Fur tool, use the Comb Fur tool and some of the paint tools to style the fur. Finally, use the Add Dynamics tool to make the fur react to the character’s motion and external forces.

Using Paint Fur Density

  1. Click the Paint Fur Density tool on the Fur tab.

  2. Select the fur object to paint and press Enter to confirm your selection.

    Note

    Modify the FG multiplier field to increase or decrease the amount of fur density to paint. A value of 0 will remove fur, 1 will not change the amount of fur, and anything larger than 1 will add fur.

  3. Drag the brush over the surface to paint it.

    Note

    You can change the Radius of your brush by holding ⇧ Shift + and dragging or by changing the value in the Operation Controls toolbar. You can also alter the Opacity in the Operation Controls toolbar.

For specific parameter help see the Paint node help.

Tips

Houdini will recook each time a brush stroke is made. To improve responsiveness while painting, reduce the Display Density on the Basic tab of the Fur Object. If this does not speed up Houdini enough, you can turn off the Display checkbox which will disable the display of hairs for improved responsiveness while you paint the geometry.

If you simply want to turn off the display of hairs for a moment when painting, you can hide other objects in the viewport by clicking in the viewer toolbar and selecting Hide Other Objects. This has the same effect on performance as turning off the Display checkbox on the fur object. Once you are done painting you can click and choose Show All Objects to display the fur again.

Once you paint the fur density, you may want to use some of the other paint tools to style the fur, such as: Paint Fur Length, Paint Clumping, Paint Base Color, Paint Frizz, Paint White Hair Density, Paint Guard Hair Density, or Paint Guard Hair Length.

You may also want to use the Add Dynamics tool to make the fur react to the character’s motion and external forces.