I just purchased 'Anything Grows' and am waiting for it to arrive. In the course of installing 'bones' in this beast tonight, I was wondering, if I grew a coat of fur on him, would the fur take on the colors of the underly texture?

Nice little doggy, Kelley ! Yes the texture-map will color the fur . But one thing i'd be curious to know is how bones will interact with the fur deformer ... Please keep us updated and show us how it turns out ! litst

Good point. As soon as I get the two together, I'll let you know. ps: Grolokks are small-brained, short-tempered herbivores that are only semi-domesticatable as draft animals. Petting them is not reccomended.

Litst: I posted your query to Eric at DigitalCarvers and faster than thought itself, he got back to me tonight. The news is good. The following is his reply: Anything Grows is compatible with Carrara's bones. There was a bug in the initial Carrara 2.0 release where bones wouldn't work with deformers, but that's been fixed with the latest Carrara patch. There is one gotcha though, because the bones change the size and shape of the facets before they are fed to Anything Grows, the random distribution of strands may end up changing around as you move the bones. If you've got lots of strands, it may not be noticable but you may see some flickering strands.

Ha, thanks for passing the info, Kelley ! The second part of Eric's message makes me believe that it can be difficult to have a clean render for an anim of a furry character :( . Is your little pet-not-to-pet intended to be animated ?

Hi, litst: Yes, the Grolokk will be animated. [check out the "Penitent's Gate" images in the Carrara gallery] As my character [Kidon] comes in through the gate, I want two freight wagons, each pulled by a grolokk, to be on their way out. The critters don't have to be on screen very long.

Eric's caveat seems to be: don't use a lot of strands. Mayhap a coarse hair instead of smooth fur? Or maybe hair on selected parts of the body...I could grow the hair on another object and put it inside with the strands extending out through the grolokk? [My serial numbers came in today. I'll keep you posted.]

He looks like a coarse hair kind of guy to me. ;> How would you keep the 'hair-object' following a leg when it moved? Maybe parent it to the bone? Or, something else?

I think your last suggestion is very ingenious : this way, you won't have to deform the mesh from which the strands are generated . Parenting to the bones should work well, like bluetone suggested . What i understand from Eric's post is that the more strands you have, the less artifacts you will have . Maybe i'm misunderstanding what he wrote, though . If you have the time, i'd suggest to make some tests with long fur and everything you'd wish to see in your final anim . If artifacts appear, there will surely be a way to make them disappear later by tweaking the fur . But hey, tests take time ... Can't wait to see the final anim, i knew your previous images already and they're excellent ! litst

Here's the latest update from Eric@DigitalCraver's Guild:

"BTW, after your initial email I started playing around with the Bones and Anything Grows. It works great for stills, but as I suspected, looks terrible for animations. I've started working on an update that will hopefully solve the flicking strands problem. If all goes well, look for it
towards the end of this month."

Hi folks,

Here's the first test file, still got some work to do, but basic principle worked.

http://www.digitalcarversguild.com/linked/bonefur.mov

I know it's not a litst caliber critter, but what do you want for a five minute test file.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

Wow, that works great Eric ! :)