Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition

Creating fur and hair

Fur, in the world of computer graphics, is considered among the most difficult things to recreate, both because it's generally quite expensive from a memory management point of view (a single character can easily have millions of hair strands) and also because it can be quite a task to make a believable shader that can work under different light conditions.

Blender is not new to fur creation; the exact goal of the open movie Big Buck Bunny was to add tools for fur creation to the Blender Internal rendering engine, and it did it through a new type of primitive, strands, which have to be enabled in the Particle panel (the Strand render item); strands are very instanced on the particle system, but they can be edited, combed, ...