Bunny twink + custom alpha fluff tutorial

thirteeenth

Hey, I'm having a blast with the new editor and made this cute bunny twink to test things out.

I've used custom alphas for the fur and stripes and made a quick ring model for the piercings.

Also had a lot of fun making things fuzzy with the fluff appendage.

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If you want to make fluff like like this here's a quick tutorial:

Out of the box fluff is basically just a square plane but when you add an alpha map to it you can give it the appearance of hair strands. This is the alpha map I made really quickly for testing

Imagine this texture being stretched to the length and width of the fluff plane, so a longer plane will in this case result in a spikey look. You can modify this texture to get other interesting results too.

So first thing we do is import this custom alpha map. It's important that the file is a .png and that it has a size that is a multiple of two (256x256, 512x512 etc).

You can find the prompt under the Import tab. Import/Texture

It will prompt you to select your file and ask if you want to import it as a Map or a Mask (A map in this case would be a colored texture like an eye while a mask is a black and white image that essentially works like a stencil). We want to import as a Mask.

Now we create a Fluffgroup by clicking the + on the Appendages tab.

Put down a few fluff planes on your character (these can be modified with the sculpting tool) and look for AlphaMask in the Fluffgroups properties. Click on the circle under the cog and select your custom alpha texture.

After loading your character the alpha planes may not immediately work, you can fix this by simply saving your character again.

https://sta.sh/02g3a3lck5wg

Dogson

Really awesome to see you pushing the fluff content there to it's fullest potential as of yet, would never have thought to see the fluff be used to create actual hair. 

odes

Wow, the level of detail on this character is insane. And you were able to figure these things out so quickly! Goes to show what an amazing artist you are, thirteeenth.

Thanks for sharing how you did it too. I'm sure other users will benefit from that.

Thumbs up!

edit:
BTW! The clip mask works with dithering, so the mask can be gradual and it will appear to be more transparent. Would be interesting to see what this character looks like with that!

rusty9

Damn, This is awesome ! I didn't even knew something like that was possible.
 also thanks for the guide.

thirteeenth

@Dogson @odes Thanks guys! Again this thing is blowing me away. It took a moment to understand how some of the things work together but once I got it, it was going well.

I really dig how easy it is to get custom things to work and the fact that the fluff and model groups don't drag down the performance even if you put down a lot is great!

Really awesome work, I look forward to seeing where you guys take it from here.

@rusty9 Thank you and you're welcome

thirteeenth

Okay calling this guy done. If I would want to share this character including the custom textures and meshes what would be the best way to set up the files? Maybe put everything into one folder? Or would people need to reimport and put accessories on themselves at this point in development?

odes

Any files imported are packed inside the save file (and they can be extracted from the save file too). You don't need to include anything but the save file.

Keep in mind though that any files linked will have their paths exposed in the save file. If you'd upload it to the cloud, these paths would be wiped, but if you share the file manually, they'll still be there. Our priority right now is to get the cloud going asap. Then you'd also be able to upload the character and get karma for it. So it's up to you if you want to share it now or wait until we have the cloud up and running.

thirteeenth

I see, that is good to know! I'll wait until the cloud is up in that case