reference
materialUsing Saslite to Create Fur
by Josh Heath |
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Clothing the Cow
Included with Lightwave are several stock objects that you can use. One of these is cow. When you load this cow into a scene and render it, however, the poor beast leaves much to be desired as you can see in Figure 1.
Note that I have rendered him with a gradient backdrop for mild artistic effect. (In Lightwave, under the Window menu button select backdrop options)
However, he still looks like a big hunk of brownness. We are going to remedy this by giving him fur with Saslite.
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Figure 1 |
Saslite, though fairly limited, can make some pretty good fur. In order to use Saslite, we must first do two things. Once you’ve opened up Lightwave’s Layout and loaded the cow object, (In the Lightwave directory under content/objects/animals/cow.lwo), go to the Window menu in the top-left of the screen and select Image Processing. You should get a new dialogue box that pops up. Click on the Add Pixel Filter button and select Saslite from the list. The Pixel filter should now be added and it should say “Saslite: Low Antialiasing.” Double clicking this should bring up a Saslite options dialogue box that looks like the one in Figure 2.
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Figure 2 |
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For now, we’re going to leave these settings just as they are, but take a look, just so you know what kind of options you have. Next we have to go into the object properties for the cow object. Under the Deform tab click the Add Displacement button and select Saslite again. After you’ve added it, doubleclick on it to bring up the setup dialogue box, like the one in figure 3. The only setting that we’ll change for now is to check the “Apply fur only to named surface” checkbox instead of applying it to all surfaces. In the Surface Name input box type “CowHide, CowFattyBelly” to apply Saslite to both of those surfaces. Click OK and then render the frame to see what you get. What will probably see is something that vaguely resembles a severely neglected Chia Pet.
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Figure 3 |
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Now that we know what we have, we know what needs to be fixed. By cranking the density up to 250% and bring the length down to around 12% we can get some much better results (Fig 4).
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Figure 4 |
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| However the problem remains that he still doesn’t look too much like a cow. To make things easier on ourselves, lets open up the cow object in Modeler. First off select the polygons of the CowHide and CowFattyBelly surfaces and make them all into one surface called CowFur. Change the color of this surface to white. Now seeing as how all stereotypical white cows come equipped with black spots, we’re going to add some spots. To do this we’ll select some random polygons on the CowFur surface. Try to select polygons in vaguely cow spot-like shapes (fig. 5). Give these polygons the surface name CowFurBlack. To keep him from having square spots, simply Cut the polygons out and Paste them back in. |
Figure 5 |
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| Save the object as Cow2.lwo and go back into the Layout. Everything should already be updated, so we just need to make changes to the fur. Go back into the object properties of the Cow2 object and remove the previously added instance of Saslite. Add a new instance and make sure that this one’s color is white and that it is only seen on the CowFur surface. Then add another instance of Saslite. This time make sure that the color is black and that it is only seen on the CowFurBlack surface. Also now that we have two instances of Saslite, you’ll need to go back to the Image Processing dialogue box. Double click on the Saslite pixel filter that you added earlier, and uncheck the “One-pass antialiasing mode” checkbox. The reason we de this is because Saslite has its own antialiasing engine. If you are going to use antialiasing in your scene you have to render the fur for every antialiasing pass or parts of it will become transparent. Now to tweak the fur a little more. |
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What the final version of your fur looks like is completely up to you, but here are the changes that I made.
CowFur |
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CowFurBlack |
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Bright & Hue Vary |
0% |
Bright & Hue Vary |
0% |
Diffuse |
150% |
Diffuse |
150% |
Coarseness |
50% |
Specular |
100% |
Frizz |
15% |
Glossiness |
50% |
Fur Density |
250% |
Coarseness |
50% |
Length |
12.6% |
Frizz |
15% |
Drooping |
75% |
Fur Density |
150% |
Clumping |
0% |
Length |
12.7% |
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Drooping |
75% |
Clumping |
0% |
By using these fur settings plus changing the color on a few of the other surfaces, we can end up with a pretty nice looking cow. Good luck! |
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