tmdag
I agree that fur needs enhancement with fur tools, like for eg. ‘shave and haircut’ has. At this moment combing hairs is just setting up normal vector angle for guides (within other packages you have more precise combing posibilities). etc….
Have you seen some of the new tools that in H11. Paint Bend, Paint Bend Noise, Paint Twist, Paint Twist Noise, Paint Thickness, Paint Frizz Frequency, Paint Frizz Roughness. Plus You can now scatter guide hairs across the skin geometry instead of positioning them only on the points.
There is more but i dont want to cut and paste too much.
lor: I understand exactly where you coming from. I guess the Houdini community would class me as an artist. Someone who isnt technically minded (its ok, i can take it
). Sometimes i come up against a problem that requires some tech know-how and normally i look into the documentation and try and find a solution, or think about how to solve the problem.
Houdini has made me more technically savvy but i agree it should always reach out to the artist as well.
They do this without compromising the core app. The new fur tools (which is what i used to quickly create the beard) are great and something i have been asking for a long time. I know, they could have solved it in a second with a closed system but instead they find ways to not only solve problems for artist but its open for everyone to see how they did it. If you look you can see how they constructed the new and old tools.
Fur rendering solution in my eyes need sample files to help us understand what is required to get good results, because clogging it up with presets will have to touch the fur tools and the rendering and lighting tools and then you getting carried away with catering to one particular request and H will become quite unbalanced. But then again, fur rendering is a matter of artist skills and choice and thats why in my eyes tutorials and sample files would be serve you. As having a button in mantra “optimized for fur” would seem out of the blue.
One area H does have presets is in L-systems, this was a good place to do this because it didnt need to interact with any other sub-system just the l-system node. Especially since one has to understand who Lindenmayer system work.
As for using my beard, really i spent 30 minutes last night using the different fur tools (Density, Comb, Bend, Clump, Length, Frizz i could have used more) and as you can see I didnt do anything special with the rendering.
Just take you time, which i know may be asking alot but especially with fur, it wont take that long to get upto speed.