These are some hairs, which I’m going to put everywhere on the body.
To do this, I’ve used a script called ‘Mouseplanter’, written by Roger Hyde. It allows you to paint objects on the surface of others in a very intuitive way.
Scary :)
Unwrapping was very straightforward. I’ve used cylindrical and planar projections as a base and then had to tweak the UV’s somewhat.
I decided to rig this guy, to be able to pose him to some degree. The rig is very simple - just some bones and IK solvers. Since there don’t occur any deformations, I could simply link the leg parts and hairs to the bones.
Since the compound eyes are made of many tiny eyes I decided to rebuild them. I’ve used a geosphere this time. Read below why.
Using the scatter compound object, I could put a tiny sphere on every vertex of the geosphere. The resulting alignment is exactly the same as in nature. The scatter object (including all those tiny spheres) was then baked as a height map to the geosphere. I could then use the height map, to displace the geosphere.
This is the complete model with all displacement maps assigned. The maps were created in Photoshop and are very simple. They consist of some noise layers, blurred with different degrees, to create bumps with different sizes. I’ve hand painted a bump on the base of every hair, as well. I’m always creating displacement maps before any other texture maps, because they deform the mesh itself, which feels like I’m still modelling. Displacement maps are also great to use as a guide fore (or even as a part of) the colour maps.
