Making of Tiger Zooby Massimo Righi, Italy Web: www.massimorighi.com


Shave and Haircut

It was the first time I was using shave and haircut and I immediately noticed how powerful this tool is. I decided to put the fur only on the tiger's head  and in some side parts of the legs and paws because for the rest of the body I thought I could achieve a pretty good fur simulation with the only using of the textures.

I created a total of six hair systems .Now I will focus on the main head fur, also considering that for the other hair systems I used the same procedure I am going to explain.

I selected the head's faces excluding the nose, inside of the mouth and eyes parts and I went to Shave ---> Created New Hair. The first time I did that, I noticed that the hair normals was pointing inside of the mesh so I reversed the normals and created the hair system again. All was fine this time.

Using the Brush tool I started scaling the hair according to the photos and when happy with the hair length I used "Recomb Hair". This command made the hair comb nicely around the head. The only thing left to do was to use the Translate and the Puff tool to fine tuning the hair style.



Then in the Material Properties of the Hair system I assigned the tiger's color texture to the Tip and Root Colors and the specular to the specular field. In the screenshot you can see my settings for that hair system.

To be able to render the hair out using MentalRay I went to 'Shave Globals' and selected 'Hair Primitives' as Hair Render Mode. I also enabled the Irradiance in the ShaveGlobals---> MentalRay tab in order to involve the hair's shader in the Final Gathering process.



To setup the scene I created a camera and enabled the depth of field. To further explain how I managed the depth of field: I made a “Distance tool” placing one locator point of focus on the model (in this case was the point of the tiger nose), and the other on the Camera lens.  Then I parented the locator to the camera therefore that, every time I moved the Camera the dimensional value also changed and I had the exact value to insert in the 'Focus Distance” field. Then I played with the F-Stop and Focus Region Scale till I found a DOF result I liked.




For lighing the scene I used an HDRI probe and three PointLights. I enabled one of them to RayTrace the Shadows and increasing the 'Light Radius' to 3000 and the 'Shadows Ray' to 5 in order to soften them.

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