Animating with Blender

Setting Up and adding parent strands for grooming

The first thing you need to do is to define your overall hair/fur area with a vertex group. An easy way to do this is to begin with a selection in Edit mode, like Figure 14.60, create a new vertex group, and assign it with a Weight of 1.0. Then, using either Ctrl-Tab or the object mode menu on the 3D view header (Ctrl-Tab will not work from Edit mode), enter Weight Paint mode and soften the edges of the selection, as in Figure 14.61. This area is where the child strands will eventually grow. In the Vertex Group section of the Particle buttons’ Extras panel, set the property to Density, and choose the created vertex group in the pop-up menu to the right, as shown in Figure 14.62.

Figure 14.60. ...