Patchy hair

I have set vertex groups for my hair and made particle systems for my hair and the hair renders ok except that it is very patchy around the legs, I have checked the normals which are ok and cant see any hair growing inside the mesh. When I go into the particle system to add more hair in the patchy bits, it wont add hair in that spot, instead adding it somewhere else in the same vertex group on a different face, but never where I want it – its like it is intentionally avoiding those spots. I haven’t been able to reduce the file size enough to upload it because if I remove the mesh of the top half of the body, I seem to then be able to add hair to the patchy bits. So I am guessing this may be where the problem is but cant for the life of me figure out why? I hope this is enough info – maybe someone else has had the problem?


Is there a Subsurf modifier on that mesh?
Make sure the Subsurf levels for viewport and render are identical.

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Yes, there is, I changed both levels to 2 and it improved but basically the same problem. Then I moved the subsurf to under the particle systems, little better but still there, then I applied the subsurf – no change. Then I made a separate particle system for the legs and did the same with the subsurf as above– still the same problem.
Im thinking there must be something going on with this mesh as its an ‘improved’? version from 2 years ago and the first version was pretty embarrassing - I probably should have started again!

Try checking ‘use modifier stack’ in the particle settings,towards the top, in emission. You woul dhave to free edit on the combing to enable it.The mesh looks fine. You may also need to increase the parent hairs from 1000 to more like 3000.
Stack:
Armature
Subsurf (both the smae)
Particle system.

That certainly is much better with those changes, the legs are still abit patchy even when combed, but the thing that stumps me most is that I cannot add hair to any of the mesh now. All other tools work in particle edit except for adding hair! I’m guessing whatever is preventing me from adding hair is also the c


ause of the patchiness on the legs. This seems to apply to the other particle systems also.

Fist it’s really great looking quadriped!

Without seeing a blend hard to know, could you chop off the top of the body and post the legs?
It’s puzzling that you can’t manually add hairs in partcle mode, hmm…

Some ideas:
apply scales, rotations (ctrl a) I think you did this.
remove doubles.
recalc normals.
select a single vert on the body, ctrl L to select connected, h to hide them. Is there any stray internal geometry? delete it.
Are you using vertex groups to control emission length or density. disable it and see what happens.

Under ‘advanced’ checkbox at top, enable it and try different combos of ‘random’, ‘even distribution’ and the random/jittered toggle.

It could be possible that you just got a really unlucky parent random seed, try changing seed value.

In particle mode, make sure ‘show chidren’ is enabled.

in the children in main partcle settings, try on of the styles (curl/braid…) set the amplitude really low ~.01, .001.

Oh dear, feeling really silly now – the one thing I didn’t check was apply scales, rotations! If I ever do that again, I’m going to smack myself really hard! Thanks so much for your persistence – it was the answer – I almost wish it was more complicated, it would justify all the time I spent on this. Thanks again :slight_smile:

Glad to see it fixed. It’s almost to the point where blender should fire a warning for unapplied scales.

The fur is really quite nice on this guy, what is your plan for it? Fur of that length works really well for animated dynamics, with just a little bounce from the movement.

Thankyou, at the moment, Im just going to use him as a render, I’m still on a very steep learning curve and one day would like to try animation but have a bit of mastering of the basics to learn (as you know!) I aspire to do something like your Snow leopard one day - it really is incredible - reminds me of the tiger in Life of Pye. Can I ask how long it took you to get to that stage in blender?

Thanks man, I started really using blender pretty much when I joined BA, 2013. Always experimenting and pushing my own limits. Best of luck with this guy, looks really good! You should start a WIP thread.