VRayFur carpets can be tricky, but with my method you give them a stylized designer look. Getting the right references and exploring their look is the key to perfection! It’s as easy as 1,2,3 …
The most crucial element while modeling something in 3d is getting your references right. We all have a general idea of what everyday objects look like, but you’ll have to go the extra mile for amazing results. Join me as I look around the Ligne Roset Carpet showroom to see what designer carpets look and feel like.
Never take the concept of references for granted. All great artists use them.
With a solid understanding of what I want my carpet to look like, I’m ready to model my carpet faithfully. I’ll be using the VRayFur function for creating a unique and photorealistic carpet. VRayFur has some powerful controls that are quite intuitive as well. Let’s take a deeper look at the overall process.
I’ve already created a carpet object with beveled edges and some good amount of poly subdivisions. The polygon count will influence the density of the vray fur. I’ve also added some bump by applying noise to it.
You can go ahead and apply VRayFur to the carpet by selecting the carpet and going into Geometry > VRay > VRayFur. While testing the look of the carpet, use a minimal scene and region render for faster feedback. The default setting for the VRayFur aren’t really that usable, so we’ll have to change a lot of them.
You can set the length and thickness for the strands of the carpet. The gravity parameter is the force which pulls the strands downwards. The Bend setting controls how flexible the strands are. While the taper value makes the strands thinner at the top. For the variation rollout, you can either set an amount or use maps to control the variation in direction, length etc.
The distribution parameter lets you set the density for the strands in two ways, per face or per area.
To give our carpet a realistic look, it needs to have a bend direction variation map applied. Just like a normal map carries direction using color, we can create a similar map adding random direction. I’ve used a simple color wheel setup of 4 colors to demonstrate the direction of the strands. You can even see the direction in the viewport when you apply a color map.
As for the material of the carpet, you can either use a gradient ramp in WU space or VRayDirt to get a darker texture near the roots. A simple reflection and bump map can also be applied to the material for even greater realism and up-close shots. I’ve also added a monotone map for getting some subtle gravity variation.
Finally, as you can see, I’ve painted a random color map in Photoshop. You can do this by randomly applying brushes of various colors that’d look like hand movements across the canvas.
A common mistake is adding too much fur density, which might take away the detail in the carpet.
DOWNLOAD VRAY FUR RUG
Hope you found this tutorial useful. Share it with your friends.
See you in the next video!
Alex
