Some great work by Andy is now visible on the Peach blog. The focus of the post there is on the strand renderer and particle system. The article goes into a good amount of detail describing the process of setting things up. An enjoyable read.
Note: Do to site outages and a few individuals having problems with the .ogg file format I’ve mirrored smaller videos on google video for those interested.
Find them here:
Fur in OpenGL.
Fur in Final Render.
Some excerpts from the Peach blog:
Now we’re able to brush our characters in real time and render 2 million hairs in HD resolution in about one minute.
Some more food for the stat junkies: Rinky currently has 1.4 million hair strands (800 children hairs per parent particle), Gamera around 1.5 million (400 childs per parent for the body and 1000 for the tail). Child particles are generated per tile at rendering time, so memory consumption is very low.
Check out the post here.
More information on the particle system updates are available on Blender.org.
And of course various builds are available to try out the particle system yourself at graphicall. (Look for the latest SVN.)
