Paint Root Color

Interactively changes the color of fur roots by painting your geometry.

See also: Fur, Paint

This tool is useful for interactively modifying the root color of fur. It allows you to manually tint the root color of fur on the skin geometry.

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 Root Color

  1. Click the Paint Root Color tool on the Fur tab.

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

  3. Choose the color to paint by clicking the color swatch in the FG field and selecting a color, or by changing the values in the text boxes next the the color swatch.

  4. 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.

The roots in this image are tinted red on one half of the grid.

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 root color, you may want to use some of the other paint tools to style the fur, such as: Paint Fur Density, Paint Fur Length, Paint Clumping, Paint Tip 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.