Elephant Textured

My Elephant character is a cuddly toy so the best way to show this is to add Hair & Fur.
After many attempts at making the hair I finally had one which looked cool.
As I hadn't used the Hair & Fur modifier before it was a bit of a challenge. I was given advice by others to up the hair count to make it look even. Turns out that wasn't what I wanted. I ended up with 5,000,000 hairs on my elephant which took an hour and a half to render 1 frame, and it didn't even look that nice!


Here's examples of the process of my first attempt at making hair ... as you can see they don't look very nice (the weird dark blue at the end of the trunk is due to lighting):








This is not what I was going for at all. The hair looks very short and harsh, not cuddly at all, so after talking to my friend Joe O'C, who had some experience with the Hair & Fur modifier, I managed to get something which looked 10 times better! Much more cuddly! :)


And here it is!:

Elephant Textured Turnaround from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

I made a simple coloured texture for the Elephant's mesh so that the little gaps in the hair were not noticable, because without it there were different coloured bits scattered around the model which looked wrong and out of place.

UV Unwrap:


Diffuse:



The tyres were a lot of fun to make. I didn't build in the grooves so I had to use Normal Maps instead which was a bit of a challenger to get to look right, but I'm happy with the results.

UV Unwrap:


Diffuse:


Normal Map:


Specular:


Ambient Occlusion: