grooming time!
Posted in Production by andy
Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on the fur grooming of our main characters (Furry & Funny, remember?). Even though it’s still an ongoing work in progress, we would like to share some of our progress and workflows with you!
The first character I managed to finish was the chinchilla (lovingly nicknamed Gamera). Especially due to the numerous improvements in particle generation, editing and rendering the results are surprisingly good. Now we’re able to brush our characters in real time and render 2 million hairs in HD resolution in about one minute. Thanks to Jahka and Brecht, our fearless developers!
In the first step a particle system is created on the character mesh, it’s important to get an optimal distribution as a basis for the parent particles. However, sometimes the results are not perfect, so a lot of times I have to add particles manually.
This is done in the next step where the particle system is set editable (aka. ‘baked’), so each individual particle can be modified by hand, either using the particle edit brushes (add, comb, puff, smooth, cut, etc.) or pulling them around one by one. This is also where the overall growth direction of the fur is defined. Another important factor taken into consideration is how the rig deforms the character.
At this point I also start drawing the full body textures to get a better idea of the final look. There are multiple layers of textures: One for the root color, which is also the ‘skin’ color of the underlying mesh and another one to color the tips. There are also bump and specular maps for the skin layer, some proceduals to control various directional aspects and a grey scale map to control the overall transparency.
For each editable (parent) particle, a set of child particles is created, usually ranging from 10 in the 3D viewport to 1000 in the final render. The child particles interpolate between the parents, but they can also have further attributes like braids, random length, frizziness, clumping, etc.
I found it to be easier to have the tail fur in a seperate particle system to get a better control over the distribution. Also whiskers and extra layers of fur are added after the base is finished.
Of course at any point of the process I have to check with sacha (director) and enrico (master of colors) if the characters are true to the original designs, and how to make them better and more appealing.
Right now i’m close to finalizing rinky, the wacky squirrel which is slightly more challenging: He has a longer, bushy tail, long pointy sideburns and more scruffy fur!
For the final rendering we also depend on some further additions like level of detail rendering, as for now all the hair strands have a fixed size. Also for better lighting we need deep shadow maps and a slightly more physically accurate light falloff (area lights).
One big question mark at the moment is, how often we can run dynamic simulations on the fur. we have very fast, snappy animations, will the fur look too rubbery or too stiff? How much time can we spend on refining that? How to deal with intersections? Also, in an ideal world you would want the animators to be able to control the fur, is that feasible for us?
Some more food for the stat junkies: Rinky currently has 1.4 million hair strands (800 children hairs per parent particle), Gamera around 1.5 million (400 childs per parent for the body and 1000 for the tail). Child particles are generated per tile at rendering time, so memory consumption is very low. Furthermore, all textures are created in png format, currently at a resolution of 4096 pixels.
As a final goody, here is one of my rendering tests with Gamera in motion. (1st one is only the parent particles, 2nd one is the final render)
Anyways, back into the trenches… Stay tuned!
.andy
December 12th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
WOW! That looks amazing, Blender is really coming on in leaps and bounds!
Just a quick q – does andy not have a SHIFT key on his keyboard for making CAPITAL letters :)
December 12th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
realy like the new update
December 12th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
That’s freaking awesome!
December 12th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Holy carrots! I just had to say that! This was the post I was looking forward to the most. Fur, hair on the hare
December 12th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
drooool!!! how are you going to handle dynamics ? softbody ? In shrek for example, the parent fur can be rigged and animated, and them the child is dynamic…
December 12th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Hieaaaa…. Great work.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
@andy: in the first clip…try to have the eye closed in squash hit a frame before, and then lead the stretch with a stretch in the eyelid, and exaggerate the opening so to have a more surprised look.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Amazing work guys! Keep it up!
December 12th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Very nice. Unbelievable work of coders!!!
The animation is brilliant, I mainly admire the distribution of particles on the ears.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Great work! congratulations…
December 12th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
hey!!!… that looks very good!… in the next release will fix the fixed size of the particle?… congratulations for the improvements in the new baked particle system, that looks very easy to control.
again great work!!!
December 12th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Mal: i am sorry for this earth-shattering mistake of mine… corrected it for your reading pleasure.
gianmichele: physics > for now the particle parents can be handled as softbody objects, which can work quite well in some cases. it’s also quite problematic for extreme deformations and fast movement, so i have to do further tests…
animation > yeah i guess i could have spent a bit more time on the animation than the fur… XD
pablos: it is possible to give particle strands a fixed size in blender units (we use that for grass), however this is not an optimal solution for hair rendering…
.andy
December 12th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Simply wow!
It’s great to see that things are really starting to come together. I think this project will be an even greater success than Elephants Dream. Despite what some may say, I think Elephants Dream was a huge success. The project achieved its goals, and this project appears to be even more on track. Congratulations!
December 12th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Wow..!! a great work made in blender ;)
Congrats to all the team :)
December 12th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
That is absolutely beautiful! It looks Ratatouille quality! (It’s the more recent furry 3D film I can think of)
December 12th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Looking amazing. Keep up the great work.
December 12th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
pixar here we come :D
i can only imagine what blender will be like after this project, i think many a professional are starting to take notice!!!
December 12th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Great Job Andy-Sensei! ;)
December 12th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
It’s Alive!
December 12th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Truly impressive. On the final animated video, fur looks so warm and soft. Almort a handpainted feel, and it gives a lot of character. Congrats to the developpers, obviously, but also to the artists who are currently showing the way…
December 12th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Woaaahh! Fear the mutant eyes ;)
As grafixsuz I also couldn’t wait so see the first ‘new fur’ animations for Peach :)
Great work so far, can’t wait to see the refinements .. and of course how longer hair/fur works out :)
Werner
December 12th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Wow! This keeps looking better and better.
The shader flow looks pretty daunting but the end results speak for themselves. Hope there will be a ton of making of on the DVD to help us all get up to speed on these amazing tools.
December 12th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
WOWOWOWOWOWOW He looks awsome! What renderer are you using for this?
December 12th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Can’t wait to use this my self.
blender on!
December 12th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwooooooooooooooowwwww!!!!!!
December 12th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Dusty: it’s blender’s internal renderer of course.
December 12th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I thought so, I just couldn’t believe it at first. ;)
Ok, then I say it again! WOWOWOWOWOWOW! :)
December 12th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
*bang!*
Did you hear that?
That.. was the sound of my jaw hitting the ground.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Could the developers make this work on the particles also easy for other stuff like smoke and similar?
December 14th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Looking good. I hope you’ll push for a bit more fluff with the fur though. Make it slightly irregular at the ends of strands if possible.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Looks amazing!
Any plan to render some nice Peach wallpapers with these cute funny furry creatures?
You have to start thinking about an evil Peach merchandising plan to conquer the world: wallpaper, mugs, T-shirts,… ;-D
December 14th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Words fail me … absolutely amazing work guys.
Now maby Chin will be less agitated for his next interview (without freezing his ass off). :)
December 14th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Looks more than amazing ! :)
December 14th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Holy frijoles can this be my Blender? Props to the developers and the whole Peach crew.
Sideburns eh. Do you know what they are saying? They are saying the Power is ON, Jack!
December 14th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
In what coffeshop do you buy your stuff? Normal human can’t work so fast ;)
It’s amazing.
December 14th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
WOW!!!Looks Amaaaaaazing!
…all the best!
December 14th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Holy hell, that’s incredible. I smiled at the animation. Keep it up you guys!
December 14th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Freak’n awsome fur! Is it possible to SSS the fur? That would be pretty sweet.
Can’t you convince your furry actors to dress up as father elves (or raindeers?) so we can have tham as a X-mas:y wallpaper? This way we can all help spread the good news.
December 14th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Congrats for the coders… looks like rat-a-touille fur. Really great.
December 14th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
The one issue I take is that Chinchillas have really long fur. This guy is the right shape, but it should be much more from his hair and less form his body.
Fur looks just great though, perfect for what you were going for.
December 14th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
outstanding x_X
December 14th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Excellent fur guys , and really quick to render too .
Now ,sorry in advance for being off topic :
I would like to know if it would be possible to have an option to set some bone as un-weightable ?
or at least only do heat-weighting for actual visible bones .
It would be very nice cause , now you can duplicate bones with all the constraints kept (which is really a time saver while rigging).
But if you do parenting , all the bones (iks and others) will have weight applied on the mesh , even those who were on an other bone layer .
________________________________________
So again excellent fur ,rigging ,rendering , in fact this short movie will attract much more people than elephants dream did . I’m sure of that .
Peace :).
December 14th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Wow. Things are really coming on from Elephants Dream. And that’s from someone who thought Elephants Dream was unbelievable.
December 14th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
hey! nice work!
when is it going to look as good as lyubomir’s work???
http://www.darkblueinteractive.com/rabbit_head_test.jpg
December 14th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
lyubomir’s fur tests are great (of course in terms of shading the results can be much better with the new system), in this case we’re going for something different though: less realism, more stylized… it’s a cartoon after all! :)
December 14th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
That fur looks absolutely wonderful.
Extend my thanks to Jahka and Brecht.
Too bad Kmplayer won’t open the .oggs. =(
December 14th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
This is so great, the fur, the movements, the subtle details of the expression, you immediately sense the character.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Simply, THE BEST! Great and realistic fur!
December 15th, 2007 at 12:09 am
It couldnt be better, its perfect! Great work! Nice inspiration and imagination; Keep the dream ;)
Now Autodesk, will do their best to close exports and imports from, to, Blender.
December 15th, 2007 at 12:29 am
@andy: my blender god (and being an atheist that may or may not say something..)
@Sergeant: install vlc.
December 15th, 2007 at 1:21 am
how are people watching this?
what is an .ogg?
can you please post on youtube so the anti-ogg-ers can watch too!
looks great by the way….and what happened to my shoes comment on the pevious post…dang thought ton was against censorship…
ahh..i will try and behave from now on…by the way i have crapped better fur then that hahaha!!!!!!!!
December 15th, 2007 at 1:45 am
No wonder the site was down. You guys rule!
December 15th, 2007 at 1:50 am
chuckster, ogg can be sound of video, it is a format without patent restrictions unlike mp3/mp4/wma etc, as people have suggested, get http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ or grab the codecs that allow it to play in any windows apps http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/downloads.html
PS, stop sucking your beard.
December 15th, 2007 at 4:17 am
Just one word – monstrosus !!!
December 15th, 2007 at 4:41 am
from the fur animation test clip and knowing sacha is writing and dircting, and andy is modeling and animating i will say this is going to be gold…now its not as decent as somthing i would produce….because i have crapped better animations…but this movie is going to rock!
December 15th, 2007 at 5:25 am
chuckster post a damm link
December 15th, 2007 at 7:39 am
zanqdo: chuckster is trolling, out of malice or because he thinks he sounds hilarious. don’t waste your breath.
re: the fur. Looks beautiful. I’m using it in a project already. :]
December 15th, 2007 at 10:01 am
This is kinda random question … what dark theme is that for the Blender UI? I would love to have the same!
December 15th, 2007 at 10:45 am
+peter: It looks like the rounded theme provided with Blender. Also jendrzych’s icon theme is used. You can set the theme at the user preferences. Icon set can be found at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=84971 .
December 15th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
One question anyone of the peach team.
Is this new tool particle engine is production really or it still need work?
I like the result that was done.Can’t wait to see the movie.Happy holiday to all!
December 15th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
That final animation is fantastic! Like the way the images are laid out in the blog post, too. :-)
Are the advanced hair features in Blender 2.45? Or only in the CVS?
December 15th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
@Mark – only in SVN, a fairly recent addition
@RNS – I wouldn’t say production ready, but it wont go through changes that break your blend files. so its fairly safe to use.
December 15th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Shul: I’d rather not. KmPlayer can play them, I just had to enable file association for .oggs. Again, those tests look great!
December 16th, 2007 at 3:00 am
Looks great. Thanks for being so detailed in your posting. Very interesting. Keep up the good work.
December 16th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Brilliant, can’t wait for the better shadowing though, as in my view, this is the only thing still really lacking!!
@blackboe:
Actually, ZanQdo wasn’t wasting ‘breath’… ;)
~epat. :)
December 16th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Am I only imagining or does Chin look like Eben Moglen? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen ) Now, Chin must be really intelligent, huh?
Nice work guys! I’m gonna brag about Peach until my throat bleeds. :)
December 16th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
@Daerd, Chin? Sorry, not ours. We call him Gamera. Fits the character much better. Google for Gamera and you’ll see.
December 17th, 2007 at 4:02 am
Turns out Chin is an impostor. Next time I do a a behind the scenes interview for BN, I’ll double check my sources. ;-)
December 17th, 2007 at 4:24 am
@Sago, ummm Gamera…Maybe it is more a personality resemblance? Maybe >(^&^)
December 17th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Andy or Sago,
Any chance we can get a screen shot of the particle system window for Gamera?
December 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Tim: here you are: /wp-content/uploads/gamera_particles.png
i’m not entirely sure how useful it is though.
.andy
December 17th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
The fur looks great, nice detail, especially the stray long hairs sticking out. The pink skin around eyes kinda freak me out. Don’t chinchillas (or whatever Gamera is) have any fur around they eyes?
December 17th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
@andy:
settings: what’s the benefit of using strand-rendering instead of adaptive-rendering?
thanx
s.
December 17th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
simon: it’s about 10 times faster!
but actually it’s not either “adaptive” OR “strand”… these are two seperate things. strand only means that it’s using the new primitive type that brecht coded specifically for this purpose.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
andy next time post about the lighting setup you are using, what kind of lamps, what kind of shadows etc :) great post btw!
December 18th, 2007 at 1:10 am
sweet !!
December 18th, 2007 at 8:22 am
ZanQdo : You will get the all light setup and etc after the short movie get finished
like Elephant Dream so don`t waste the artist time for what you will dissect after Peach will be finished ? Think more!
Sago : You mean gamera like this “turtle” “http://tinselman.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/gamera_b.jpg”
andy : good work
So the duration of the short movie will be ?!
December 18th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Terrific stuff!! I love the aspect of these characters… I’will be a great movie!
December 18th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Looks good. The new particle system could prolly help with the could I was doing but I have yet to get the new SVN.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Numarul7: I think they said that “A Rabbit’s Revenge” will be a little over 7 minutes long.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Ratatouille quality is nowere near this kind of rendering.
Blender rocks!!!
December 18th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Strand size controlled by depth was coded quite a long time ago…
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9468&highlight=hair
I’ll be surprised if even peach can’t get this feature in. It drives some of us crazy.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Mark Keller thx
I think the script it is changing day to day from what it I see on the blog ?!
Like the hair texture hmm it is the hair affected by de gravity ?! If not then this feature must be the next or making it with some “wind”
Hope will see some “springy” hair.
andy : Played now the ogg`s can you make the ears to move conform with his expression of his face ?! Like going down when sad and “springy” when happy ?! And skip some frame moves kinda slow in expression now or whatever but not let the ears stay stiff they have expression to.
Yeah ! This one it is a gamera when animated !
Sorry for the “crits”
I like this character :)
December 19th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
OMG…. I love it.
I really wasn’t expecting that from blender. I always tried to animate fur. but i never succeeded…
will we get a tutorial for the fur someday??? :P
December 19th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
dang…a week and no new thread..dont make me punch zanqdo in his hair pruse…
post a new one…do it!
December 19th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
So is this feature in any of the SVN builds yet?
regards
stefan andersson
December 19th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Hey! folks!!, some body can tell me how they can make the particle sistem edtable, and then comb it (add, puff, smooth, cut, etc) that is some kind of script or is already built in?
December 19th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
What is this SVN stuff
December 19th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
HELLO!!!!
We are a media creators group called Miracle factory, we are considering Blender to be our pricipal platform, could you please show us its advantages??? for an example, how can we find this script or utility to create and edit fur, in the case that it can be founded???
Thankyou very much!!!
December 19th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
vdmpeniel: Any builds tagged “BF” in graphicall.org
December 20th, 2007 at 1:13 am
ZanQdo,: what do you mean? what BF means? What we want to know is this: how they do that comb stuff We cann’t found it in side the software, please tell us!!! Thanks!!!!
December 20th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Excuseme, Andy, could you please help me???
how can we do that, is already implemented in the 2.45 version?
We can put fur in a mesh but we dont know how to edit it!!!
thankyou!!
December 20th, 2007 at 1:26 am
vdmpeniel:
2.45 will not do. The new particle system was just added to the svn repository. This is bleeding edge stuff :)
You will want to go to graphicall.org like ZanQdo said and download a build that has the new particle system.
From there once you have set your particles to hair you can simple go into particle mode press the n key and your combing controls will show.
Hope that helps. join irc freenode #blenderchat to get help faster
December 20th, 2007 at 1:27 am
vdmpeniel: The reason why you cannot find it is because the Particle Rewrite is not present in the 2.45 release.
(It’s still in processes of being rewritten, so we won’t see it in the official release till it is done.)
BUT you can download unofficial builds (test builds) many of which are posted at http://graphicall.org
Some of those builds contain the Rewritten particle system.
As ZanQdo said: Any builds tagged “BF” in graphicall.org
December 20th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Congratulation to all the Peach team !
Developpers, artists… all of you do a magnificient job !
Keep it up !
December 20th, 2007 at 7:57 am
ccherrett-
Thanks for the N tip. I’d been going crazy trying to figure out where it was located.
December 20th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Hi, staff… give us more news… we are impatient…
bye bye
December 20th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Thank you very much, now I can understand, I will go for it.
GBU
December 21st, 2007 at 9:08 am
For rendering,to give a better look,probably you could try to blend(screen/add) the color at tip with a cube map indexed with the normal map to,a little blurred(this fakes gi ambient lighting very well),and black at root for occlusion faking.The difficoult is blurring the cube map,as it can show seams.
December 21st, 2007 at 11:58 am
woooo…100th comment :D
December 21st, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Beautifull animation that bottom one, looks very cool. Can’t wait to see the final rendered movie!
December 22nd, 2007 at 12:56 am
To simulate a good AO you can also use a “blend” texture with a “strand” Map imput and an “Emit” Map to.Then play with “DVar” in “Map to” panel to have a root darker than tip.
December 23rd, 2007 at 3:34 am
the fur looks great andy. this short movies going too Rock!!
December 23rd, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Merry christmas guys! Good work so far.
/JoOngle