Cel Shaded Cartoon Fur!?!?! (FiberFX)

[Austin_Taka]

I've been pulling my hair out for about a year and a half over this issue and I'm on the brink of something really awesome, but I just can't figure out what to do!
The result I'm looking for is this: This is made using FiberFX with a cel shader set to only one shade, so there are no shadows, and a baked texture of the underneath mesh's fur pattern.
the issue with this is that if I was to animate this, the shadows would never EVER move, because as far as I know, there is no way to change an image every frame. meaning I would have to render every frame seperate, and that would take WAAAAAY too long.
So currently I'm still stuck at this: which is FiberFX Solids (Strokes looks even worse) which are shading themselves every single fiber. The only solution I can see is if I could somehow take the lighting and shadow information from the tail's main mesh and transfer it into the fiber's surface. adding a layer of darkness over the UV map. Does anyone have any ideas or ways around this or a plugin to help? Thank you

[ernpchan]

I would suggest thinking of a solution that involves comp work. Meaning you render the pass you need then apply it in comp. Don't limit yourself to thinking you have to get it all done in camera. Productions rarely do that.

[Austin_Taka]

meaning... I use the bake surface mode? basially do that for every scene and never change the light? I'm sorry, I'm a bit new to some of the terminology. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "comp work"

[erikals]

maybe animate the normal somehow ?

http://d-creation.sakura.ne.jp/plugi...ex_english.htm

and...

https://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php/146919


might be best to skip FiberFX here, and just use pure polygons. (?)

[Austin_Taka]

I could use the FiberFX in modeler maybe, that just generates polygons... but then how to map the new polygons to the UV map of the existing geometry...

Thanks for your suggestion, I'd never seen these plugins before and they look like a lot of what I need!

I'll see what I can do...

[Austin_Taka]

DC normal drag doesn't work with vers. 2019 it looks like...

[Austin_Taka]

omg what an idiot.. I went to the wrong download page FALSE ALARM

[Austin_Taka]

Okay! it WORKED!!! 100% (plus a little bonus thing that looks cool, will have to figure out how to get rid of it though)







All from the same scene, just moving the light! All I had to do was put a reference vector above the tail, set the FiberFX PolyNormal as the target normal, and then export the world normals to the root node. there's a few kinks I'll have to work out to get it exact, and in the future, I might use mesh polygons built in modeler to get this result (can't put edges on Fibers) but for this look, it's perfect!!!

Here are the nodes


Thank you so so much! I was up all dang night because of this, but it's solved now!!!

[shrox]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "comp work"

Compositing images together.

[erikals]

nice.  

hm, curious, does the shader/render have an error ?

[Austin_Taka]

seems to, if I look at the normals there's something wrong too