Adventures across the 3rd dimension

I still don't get that extra vertex import thing.
I have enough trouble keeping track of the vertices I know about.

Still no body for my cat head while I do a hair experiment.

Now why can't I get the Mirror Particles option to work?

*googles*

Ah, because the Mirror Particles option ... doesn't work properly.

I'm already trying to add and groom hairs one at a time and that seemed like too much work when I was only gonna attempt half of them.

I fear my body-less Khajiit head may not progress any further unless new plans are discovered deep in my brain.

Build the khajiit, paint the hair on top of the render

I have mirrored the particles!

The topology of the mesh wasn't symmetrical (due to my overuse of the lumpy dyntopo feature) and that was messing everything up.
But now the head looks too floofy with all those neat hairs.
I can't find a way to add variety to the interpolated children (you can with simple children but they look too patchy) so it'll probably need multiple layers of particle instances of different lengths.

This experiment is taking more time than I'd like. I should probably do a bit of vertex painting next.

This ... isn't working at all.

*goes away to think*

Valence wrote:

...you can with simple children but they look too patchy...

 

Poor kids

Forget about particles.
And their simple children.

I've just discovered that since version 3-point something (and I have now committed to 3.6 despite liking 2.83) Blender has a completely different hair system that's much easier to use and has a lot more options.
That's what all those hair things in the Asset Browser are for! I wondered what all that stuff was.
And it even has a default fur preset!

*looks at deadline*

Yeah, I know it's a bit late in the month to start learning something completely new.
And as a result I may end up with a last minute 2D painting for the challenge but I'm off to watch some more videos anyway.

*uses Blender 4.2* (And that's not even the latest version)

Versions 4.0+ are a bit slow and "crashy" on my old PC.

Anyway after some experimenting... the other hair system needs... UVs.
So I tried my best to unwrap and the resulting attempt at sculpting the hair was excruciatingly slow on the high-poly lumps of the cat head.

So I decimated it down to a fraction of the faces and now it's much more workable. And you can apply and modify everything much quicker than the particle system. And the snakehook lets you pull and stretch the hairs out in a very satisfying way.
Don't know how the texturing's gonna work yet. That's part three of those videos I haven't completed yet.