Hair and Particle Systems - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 121

9
hAir And PArticle systems

Blender's particle systems are a powerful tool that
you can use to create both static and dynamic hair
and animated particle effects. They can also be used
to populate your scene with instanced objects in
order to create grass and other foliage. In this chap-
ter, we'll use Blender's hair particles to create fur for
the Bat Creature and to create grass for the Jungle
Temple scene.
When you add a particle system to an object,
the system is initially set up as a dynamic one that
spawns point particles that are then simulated using
Blender's physics engine. In this chapter, though,
we'll mostly use the “hair” type for particles to cre-
ate strands that are emitted from the surface of your
mesh by default (see Figure 9-1). These strands will
respond to physics and can be combed over the sur-
face of your model and be procedurally modified to
look like hair, fur, grass, or a variety of other materi-
als. You'll learn how to move from the default system
shown in Figure 9-1 to creating realistic hair and fur
that we'll add materials to in Chapter 12 and then
render in Chapter 14.

Particles for hair
In order to make Blender's basic particle system
resemble fur or hair, we need to give it some guid-
ance. First, we determine where and how we want
the fur to grow, after which we can comb the result-
ing hair for more control over how it looks. But
rather than do this for hundreds of thousands of
hairs on a body, we'll define a few hairs by hand as
parent particles and then have Blender fill in the
rest with child particles automatically. These stages
are represented in Figure 9-2: First, the particle sys-
tem is added ❶ ; then, the hair is restricted to some
areas with a vertex group ❷ ; next, it's combed ❸ ;
and finally, child particles are added ❹ . You then
have a basic render ❺ .

Choosing an Object to Add Hair To
One question to think about when creating the hair
or fur for a model is what mesh you want to assign
the particle system to, as this can be approached
in several ways. The simplest option is to just add a