Chester - Grooming Project

For this project I was really lucky to team up with two incredible talented artists: Stefan Klosterkötter (texturing) and Laura Ludwig (lighting, compositing, set dressing, rig).

I wanted to create a grooming project of a furred animal for my demo reel. So I contacted Stefan as I was told that he might be interested in creating such a project together. We both started looking for a good model that Stefan could texture and I would be able to groom. Meanwhile we asked Laura if she might be interested in joining our project to create the lighting. She joined our team and from that on we started to plan everything together. As soon as we found the chimpanzee model by Christian Leitner we decided that we would buy it and create a shot with it.

So here I present you my first fur groom:

References

References were important for me to plan the groom. I gathered a lot of different chimpanzee photographs and realized that the fur of chimpanzees can be really different. I decided on what kind of fur type I wanted to created and how to split up the groom in different descriptions. I drew on top of some references to plan the guides. 

Here you can see my guides and the different descriptions shown in different colours:

Before I started my groom I created a UV set for it as it had to be all in one UDIM. I was working with 13 different descriptions. The displacement map was plugged into XGen so the groom would react to it. I started to create rough guides for the descriptions and refined them later. To avoid that the different descriptions would create doubled hair in certain areas I multiplied different density maps. For the hair lenght and width I used random expressions so the hairs would show variations. I used different clumping and noise modifier and also used random expressions and different maps on them. 

The whole groom was created with XGen Core except for the peachfuzz where I used XGen interactive groom and exported the guides as curves to bring them to xGen Core. 

The hair shader was using IOR instead of melanin because it looked better in our renders. I used a random noise expression to create a map for the random white stray hair in the fur. It was brought through aiUserDataColor to the Arnold hair shader.

Close Up Turntable

Everything was rendered with Arnold in Aces.
Compositing in Nuke.

Thank you for reading my entry!