Fluffy earmuffs

This week felt like a journey back to the roots of this blog: one mistake followed another.

I wanted to continue with the 3December thing, but I couldn't decide which topic to choose, so I reduced the number of potential candidates to three: arctic fox, pine cone, and earmuffs, and I started working on all of them.

The pine cone wasn't going well at all, so I did a quick test of the fox. I box-modelled a four-legged abomination, parented it to a pre-made wolf rig, and sprinkled it with a hair cutout that was distributed over the body via a particle system. The best fox anyone has ever seen. But I wasn't going for a faithful representation of the animal; I just wanted to see if Sketchfab would work with hair cards. And it looked like it could. As long as the particle system ended up converted to individual cards, that is. 

But I encountered another problem with the fox: I didn't really want to make it. I'm trying to focus on re-usable items right now, and there are just not many scenes where I could put it. So I switched my attention to something more usable, the winter earmuffs. (Not really. I don't own any, and I don't know anyone who does. Who wears them, anyway?)

Since my interest was already piqued by the hair cards, I started watching a CG Cookie tutorial on how to make them. I only managed to create the texture and the initial curves, though. When I started placing the curves, it quickly turned out that this was not going to happen. First, it was very imprecise and infuriating, and second, I fell ill on Friday. And because I'm still feeling pretty unwell, I had to change my plans once again and go for the regular hair particle system. 

But I'm still going to show you my first attempt with hair cards (they seem to be the way to go when creating realistic characters, so I won't be able to avoid them in the future). This is the texture I put together:

and this is the best I could make it look with the help of a particle system:

Not very good, is it? I know. The final render did end up slightly better than I thought it would, but it still doesn't have the perfect fluffiness I wanted it to have. And the nail head rendered burnt-orange, for some weird reason, so I slammed an image of an actual nail head on top of it in Krita. Please tell me you didn't notice... 

Aaand, this will be all for this week. Next time, I'm going to make a nice jumper/pullover, and after that the SculptJanuary will be almost upon us. Well, upon me, anyway. I'll try to stick to one sculpture each day, if possible, but I'll post them in nice weekly packages. And maybe there'll be a story involved in it somewhere... See you next time!