If you get download and install 9.1 169, you can find the fur docs by clicking on Contents > Fur from the online docs page. All the basics are covered in these lessons. Here is the lesson outline:

• Basic fur setup
  Casting shadows
  Changing the color of the fur using the color attribute
  Control the Fur Color using a Color Map
  Control the fur density using a texture map
  Controlling the thickness, shape, and frizz
  Shaping hairs
  Styling the fur
  Using clumping
  Using guide hairs
  Varying the fur density by painting attributes
  
  One of the most important things taught in these lessons is how to use the fur sop for PREVIEWING your fur while at the same time using the fur procedural to do the actual rendering. This way the hairs are being generated by Mantra much more efficiently than if you created the geometry using the fur sop.
  
  9.1 also now includes built-in cvex shaders and a hair material that can now be texture mapped in order to help artists get great results out of the box. If you learn to create your own cvex shaders you can do more but all the most important controls are now available without getting into cvex at all.
  
  Have Fun!!
  
  PS - we will follow up with a video tutorial after we get feedback on these lessons.

Great news! Thanks!

Hey Robert,

Nice stuff! I hope there's a lot deeper Cvex stuff coming too

The Extract shelf tool doesn't work for me, but easy enough to manually make an Object Merge for the Guide and Skin geos.

Small thing: It's better to use: AOUT_Guide and AOUT_Skin so that when you browse for them they are at the top of the Browse list.

Great to see this stuff coming out!

Cheers,

Peter B

Thanks alot!!
Can't wait to dig into this!

Next step long hairs?


Cheers!

Excellent.

Im going through the tutorials, really easy to follow along (like any Houdini tutorial, thanks to the nature of Houdini) but also it explains why and how etc.

Ive begged for documents like this for ages, and i cant thanks you guys enough.

I have a primitive mind and certain things take a while to compute.

I think when i get comfortable, thanks to these written tutorials and hopefully the videos i can start to learn the CVEX functions and realize all the possibilities of working within a more custom setting.

I can tell you guys put alot of work into this, so thank you so much.

I will hopefully have some renders down the line once i get use to the Fur setup and workflow.

thank you SESI. I knew Fur would be implemented in a far superior way than any other app, and now i get to learn how to utilize it.


-andy

edit/ Rob you must be really proud of those videos, and not wanting to just put them up on the site just for people to leech. Well you have my interest and right now im getting ready with these tutorials so hopefully nothing will confuse me with the video content. Again, thank you.

phrenzy84
Excellent.

edit - Rob you must be really proud of those videos, and not wanting to just put them up on the site just for people to leech. Well you have my interest and right now im getting ready with these tutorials so hopefully nothing will confuse me with the video content. Again, thank you.

Glad you like the docs. The docs team has been very busy over the last year updating ALL the docs to H9 and they are doing a great job.

As for videos. They haven't been recorded yet. I want to add some info on using wire dynamics on the guide hairs and then combine this with the steps outlined in the docs. Once they are ready then they will go online for anyone to use.

Hello ,



Great tutorials!

I'm doing the first one (Basic Fur Setup).

My hairs don't pick up the color of the Skin geometry…
I assigned the Hair Material to the grid but if I render all is gray….

Also, in the viewport the hairs stay black…




thanks,


bern

there are a number of errors in the tutorial:

Basic Fur Setup

since we're NOT rendering the Fur object - the material isn't passed through the SKIN_OUT node to the REFERENCE_OBJECT

rendering REFERENCE_OBJECT without this material will result in gray fur…

inside the fur object, BEFORE the SKIN_OUT node, insert a material node, set the material to /shop/hair

the Fur object node should have no material, no procedural and not be renderable - because it's just being used for visulization

the REFERENCE_OBJECT should have the procedural and be renderable.

—

Changing the color of the fur using the color attribute.

1 . Insert a Point SOP node after the Copy SOP in the Fur geometry object you created in Basic fur setup.

this should read;

Insert a Point SOP node after the Copy SOP in the Fur geometry object you created in Using Guide Hairs.


I'll try to go through the others if I can…

a couple of very helpful things would be:
beta test the tutorials
provide the hip files for each stage - lesson begin, lesson end etc


thnaks

Hello,



Now it get's a little complicated. Long awaited first tutorial and already mistakes….




thanks anyway,



bern

I made the changes to your file

Thanks arctor.

arctor
a couple of very helpful things would be:
beta test the tutorials
provide the hip files for each stage - lesson begin, lesson end etc

In my original post I was asking for a second pass of testing from the community. We did test in the office and while things are working fine as written, there seems to be a couple places where problems can occur:

The steps in the lesson are fine. In Bernard's example, the only problem was that the hair material got assigned to the reference object instead of the fur object. I guess the drag and drop didn't find the fur object.

It is possible to use the setup shown in the docs with the render flag on the null object, the display flag on the fur sop, and the hair material and fur procedural assigned to the fur network's object. (see attached) While Arctor's suggestion will also work we wanted to show that the fur sop and the fur procedural could work on the same object.

For picking up the color, the default setup shown assumes that you are using guide hairs. Arctor's suggestion works if you don't have guide hairs but it is best to use guide hairs for fur. Unfortunately the order of the lessons is alphabetical and it looks like the guide hair lesson is at the bottom. It should really be second. We will find a better way of ordering these. Thanks for the testing.

These are things that are hard to pick up internally when everyone knows how things work and make too many assumptions about what artists in the real world will do. Better ordering of the lessons and some example files to show off the results at the end of each lesson would help.

pbowmar
Hey Robert,

Nice stuff! I hope there's a lot deeper Cvex stuff coming too

The Extract shelf tool doesn't work for me, but easy enough to manually make an Object Merge for the Guide and Skin geos.

Small thing: It's better to use: AOUT_Guide and AOUT_Skin so that when you browse for them they are at the top of the Browse list.

Great to see this stuff coming out!

Cheers,

Peter B

I remember you once said that you did not like “Show Current Operator” at the sop level. If you have “Show Display Operator” then the Extract workflow won't work as written. We figure that anyone who knows to change this option will know how to set up an objectmerge themselves.

The AOUT idea is a good production tip. Thanks.

I'm now sure when some indepth cvex stuff will be available. Hopefully the shaders used here can give you something to tinker with.

Excellent. I knew I picked the right time to start learning Houdini.

I'm going to try this out again but…
assigning the Hair material to the Fur object in the Material Parameter doesn't feed the SKIN_OUT the proper attributes…assigning the Hair material with a material SOP before SKIN_OUT does.

I checked with the developers to find out if there was any disadvantage to assigning the material at the object level and there does not appear to be any. The way the lessons is presented works fine and your suggestion also works.

ive been learning alot and trying so many things.

This isnt an extensive test but here is a little render of one thing i was testing out.

There is no density nor colour map. Very simple setup.

rmagee

pbowmar
Hey Robert,
The Extract shelf tool doesn't work for me, but easy enough to manually make an Object Merge for the Guide and Skin geos.

I remember you once said that you did not like “Show Current Operator” at the sop level. If you have “Show Display Operator” then the Extract workflow won't work as written. We figure that anyone who knows to change this option will know how to set up an objectmerge themselves.

Hi Robert,

Well, it's not that i don't like it per se, it's just not usable for anything vaguely production oriented. I figured that was the case, so I looked at the code but it's not clear what's going on in there. You're right of course that as people enter production they'll move away from Show Current and hopefully understand how to manually set up an Object Merge.

It's too bad though, having the button would be a nice workflow speedup for real work too.

Cheers,

Peter B

pbowmar
It's too bad though, having the button would be a nice workflow speedup for real work too.

If you use the “Show Display Operator” then in the lesson you would need to set the display flag on the OUT null then with the select tool select all the faces you want to extract then use the tool. I did a quick test and it seemed to work OK.

With “Show Current Operator” it is possible to select and extract faces on the OUT node even if it is not displayed.

Hello,



Is it also possible to have hair clumping on a specific part of the total hair field? (like the FUR sop in H 8.1)
There it was possible to scatter some points, copy custom formed curves on those points and use them to clump the hair (in the form of the curves)



thanks,


bern

I find the tutorials absolutely excellent and easy to follow. I found no error, I did them step by step and got exactly the results described.
Indeed, their order is not the expected one, but on the other hand there are indications in each tutorial of where it fits so it's no big deal.
CVEX tuts will be nice, dynamic hair also.
Keep up the good work!

Dragos