Meerkat: Fur

Although I decided not to use it in the end I did quite a bit of research into Maya fur and the use of maps to change fur colour and baldness.

These are some of the resources I looked at:

The Maya User guide has a pretty detailed section on applying fur to animals or eyelashes.  This was a really good starting point as it talks about how to get the fur going in the right direction and touches on painting attributes.  The rest of the guide has a lot of other useful information too about working with fur, including this section on mapping fur attributes.

I also looked into dynamic Fur as this was something I thought I might like to explore.
The guide here is really old, but explains things step by step

I also found some video tutorials which looked useful:











However I decided that fur wasn't the direction I wanted to go with this, and that hand painted textures would better reflect my initial character design.


edit: Seems the rest of the embedded tutorials fell off this post :/