Mini-Class: Add Textured Hair to Your Character Designs in Blender 3D

1. Introduction: Are you struggling to add realistic fuzz and fur to your models and blender? Well, have I got a class for you? Hello, and welcome to the fourth installment of my Blender Mini class series. I'm Harry, a season three ty artist with over a decade of professional experience and the privilege of being recognized as a top teacher on Skillshare, specializing in Blender tutorials. In this class, we'll learn how to add realistic fuzz to this adorable Fox model. So it looks like it's a needle filtered character. The file we'll use in class comes fully modeled, textured, and lit. This means we can jump right into the process of adding fuzz to this charming little fox without needing to do a bunch of setup. Just download the files and we're ready to start. If you've never heard of the term needle felting before, it's a real world crafting technique where you use a specialized needle covered in barbs to weave together the coarse fibers of wool into a solid shape rather than a sheet of fabric. It's often used by artists to create adorable characters with soft fuzzy appearances on their surface. This is the technique that we're going to replicate and blender. While this is the fourth class in my mini class series, it's actually a great supplement to two of my previous full length classes. In my nome class, we learned how to create realistic hair using the particle system and blender. In my portrait lighting master class, we learned all about illuminating our characters with artistic lighting schemes. This class will touch on both of these topics as we learn a completely new way to add realistic hair to our models and how lighting can accentuate subtle details. If this is your first time learning with me, it's important to note that my blender classes are well regarded for their clarity and ease. Thanks to my step by step approach that's perfect for beginners. While this class is a shorter mini class, you can still expect thorough explanations that anyone can follow regardless of experience. By the end of this class, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to replicate this charming felting technique and blender. So, if you're ready, I invite you to join me in class. Let's jump into our first lesson together. 2. Setting Up the File: This lesson we'll begin the class by getting our file set up. If this is your first time taking a blender class, I'd highly recommend you start with my complete beginners guide to blender first. This class was designed for the absolute beginner to blender and three D art in general. We cover every single necessary topic in order to get you up to speed and running and blender. We'll accomplish this with short and focused lessons that cover each topic from a beginner's perspective, utilizing a well organized starter file. We end the class with an easy project where you set up and customize your very own cozy cam site. With that out of the way, let's continue with the lesson. While our working file is 90% ready to go, we do have some easy setup to handle before we start. First, you'll need to make sure that you have all the files downloaded. You can find them in the project resources for this class. After you have all the files downloaded, don't forget to unzip all four folders, including the folder with the blender files in it. Blender won't be able to see the texture images if you don't unzip everything first. After everything is unzipped, I'd highly recommend that you create a new folder called textures, then transfer the contents of all three texture zip folders into this single folder. This will make our next step much easier and it'll help keep the files tidy. You can easily do this by making a new empty folder called textures, then going into each of the three folders and highlighting all the files inside of it. Now hit Control X to cut the files or Control C to copy the files. Go back to the empty Textures folder and hit Control V to paste those images. Do this process with all three textures folder until they're all in one singular folder called textures. Let's go back to the Blender folder, adhere to Blender Files and Cheat Sheet, and then we're going to open Start underscore felted Fox bust underscore 01. As a quick reminder, this file was created in Blender version 4.5 0.3 LTS. I highly recommend that you use this version or newer when following along in class to make sure everything works as intended. Now that we have our start file open, we'll want to switch this left view port to the rendered view. We can do that by going up here to this button at the top right of the left view port. We're going to click the far right button so that we can see the textures and the lighting in the scene. After swapping to this rendered view, you might notice that a lot of the textures are missing, and they might even be showing as a bright pink. This is because Blender doesn't know where to look for the correct images to display. Because I created this file on this computer, Blender knows where to look for these images, but your computer might not know that. Luckily for us, this is a really easy fix. First, we'll go over here to file, and then we'll go down here to external data. And then, lastly, we'll go to find missing files. Now navigate to wherever you saved this Textures folder that we transferred all the texture images into into one place. Once you find this new Textures folder, simply select it here from the list and then choose find missing files. This will tell Blender where to look for all these texture images and automatically relink them for us. Now your rendered preview here on the left side should look just like mine, displaying all of the correct textures. The last thing we need to do is save our file so that it's ready for the next lesson. We can do that up here by going to File then choosing Save. This will make sure that all the textures remain connected when we reopen the file, and that's it. We're ready to move on with the class. In the next lesson, we'll add the first layer of short fuzz to our Fox model. I'll see you there. 3. Adding the Short Fuzz: In this lesson, we'll add the first layer of short fuzz to our fox model. Let's begin. It's time to add some fuzz to this little guy. We'll have some nice looking fuzz by the end of this lesson. However, it won't be the correct color. We'll be handling the material in the next lesson, but I wanted to warn you before we start that the fuzz is going to be pure white for the rest of this lesson and not match the orange material applied to the fox model. With that out of the way, let's jump right in. First, make sure that you have the left viewport set to the rendered view by clicking this button here found on the far right at the top of this viewport. For some reason you don't see these buttons here on the far right, you might need to hover over this toolbar here and then click in your middle mouse button to pan it back and forth so that you can see these buttons here on the far right side. Now in the right view port over here, make sure that you have this fox's head selected. You'll see it here highlighted in orange. And now with the head selected, hit Shift and A on your keyboard, and this will bring up the ad menu. We'll be using a relatively new way to add hair to our model that was introduced a few versions ago. Method will use curves and geometry nodes to create hair on our model. Luckily, for us, you don't really need to know how either of those things work in order to use this method, as it's simplified down into just a few easy modifiers. So let's add our hair now by going down here to curve and then choosing fur. Right away, we can see that our model has become a lot fuzzier in both of the viewports. The left viewport shows that white fuzz that I mentioned earlier in the beginning of this lesson. Our next steps will be adjusting the look of this fur to better resemble curly wool fibers. We'll be making these changes in the modifiers panel for this new curves object that was just parented to the fox head object. Can find the modifiers down here at the bottom right by clicking on this little blue wrench icon. Before we get too far, let's rename this curve object so that's something a bit more accurate to what it actually is. So over here in our list, we can find the word curves here just underneath the fox head object in which it's parented to. And then we can just double click on this word curves, and we'll type in short fuzz and then had enter. I mentioned a few times now that this fur has been parented to this fox head object. We can tell easily that it's been parented to it because this short fuzz object lives inside this fox head object. So if I twirl this closed, you'll see the fuzz disappears, and that's because it's actually located with inside this object. This means that anytime we adjust the position, the rotation, or the scale of the head, the parented fuzz object will follow. This just makes sure that the fuzz stays attached to the head regardless of what you do with the head. Alright, let's begin making adjustments to the fuzz. Our first step is going to be cleaning up the modifiers a little bit by simply collapsing them to make adding and moving them easier. To do this, we're just going to go down to this list down here at the bottom and then click on these tiny arrows at the left of each of these modifiers. You'll see here that it just collapsed them and makes it easier to view them. Now let's add two new modifiers that will help us control the look of the hair. To do this, we'll go over here to the Add modifier button, click here, and then we're going to choose search and then we'll type in Trim TRI, and then we'll see here trim hair curves, we can select this from the list. Reposition this modifier in the list in just a moment. Let's add one more modifier. We'll go over here to the odd modifier button, click Search again and this time we'll type in curl CURL and then choose curl hair curves. All right. Now it's time to reposition these modifiers. Each modifier adds to the effects of those beneath them. So adjusting the order of the modifiers can make a big difference in the way that the hair is rendered. You can adjust the placement of the modifiers in the list by clicking and dragging the small dots on the right side and then moving them around within the row. First, let's go down here and twirl these closed so it's a little bit easier to see let's rearrange some of these modifiers into a better order based on the effects that they have on the hair. I'll explain what each of these modifiers do as we go through them one by one later. So our first step is to grab this trim hair curves, just grabbing these dots here on the right side, and we're going to move it to the second position here from the top and then we'll go down here to the curl hair curves and drag this to the fourth position just below this interpolate hair curves. Then lastly, we're going to move friz hair curves up one level, so it's just below curl. So now just take a moment, look at my list and make sure that your list is in this exact same order. Okay, so the fox is looking pretty wild at this point. But it's just a few adjusted sliders from having a durable fuzz. Before we make any adjustments to the fuzz, one important thing I did want to point out is the difference in the way that the hair appears in the left versus the right viewport. We'll notice over here in the left viewport that we have nice smooth curves in each of these spirals. Whereas on the right side, we're seeing really jagged lines, and everything just looks a little bit more crunchy and hard and less soft. This difference is only visible in the viewport and the true appearance of the hair is actually a lot more similar to this left viewport. If it ever seems like the hair is jagged in the right viewport or it seems a bit sparse, please know that it will render much smoother and more dense than that. Now let's go through each of these modifiers from top to bottom and get a brief understanding of what they do while we adjust the settings. We'll start over here at the very top by twirling open set hair curve profile by clicking on this little arrow here to the left. Our first change is going to be adjusting the radius found here. So let's click on this value here, and then we're going to type in 0.0, zero, zero, so three zeros and then six, five, and then hit Enter. The purpose of this modifier, the set hair curves profile, simply changes the thickness and the overall shape of the hair. The main thing that we adjusted here was the radius of each individual hair, changing how thick a single strand of hair is. So in our case, we made this hair a good bit thinner than it was before by lowering this value. Factor min and the factor max adjust the thickness of the tip of the hair and the root of the hair respectively. So this min changes how thin the tip of the hair is, and the max changes how thick the base of the hair is or the root. In our case, having it set to Mn zero means that the hair will come to a very tiny point at the tip, and then the factor set to max one means that it'll be wider at the base or the root of the hair, which is exactly what we're looking for. This is how most hair would be shaped. Now that we're done with this modifier, we can simply til it closed to clean up the view, and then we're going to go to the next one, which is the trim hair curves. So we can twirl this one open now. Again, we have just one value to change here, and that's going to be the length. So we can click on length here, and then we'll type in 0.02, two, five, and then hit Enter. This trim modifier allows us to easily control how long the individual hairs are. We want relatively short fuzz, so we used a much smaller number than what was there by default. Well, we won't be using these other parameters here within this modifier. Some of the other useful sliders here are the length factor. This allows you to multiply the length of the hair by a new value to make slight adjustments to the hair length. Example, higher values mean longer hair, and shorter values mean shorter hair. In our case, we want it to be exactly what we typed in here, so we're just going to leave this set to one. Another interesting slider here is the random offset. This allows you to have the hair trimmed at random lengths to give it a slightly more natural look. We'll be handling this randomness in a different way, but you might find this useful in your own personal projects. You can add a little randomness to the length of your hairs by simply adjusting this value. Increasing the number will make the hair a bit more random in terms of its length. For our case, we're going to set this back down to zero. As I said before, we'll be handiling this randomness in a different way. Now let's move on to our next modifier, so we can twirl this one closed and then move to interpolate hair curves, and we'll twirl this one open. We have a few different things to adjust here, and the order we change them in matters. So we need to make sure that we do them in the correct order. First, let's change this view port amount down here to 0.05 and then hit Enter. Will make the hair look significantly less dense than it was. But this is only true in the viewport display. What I mean by this is that the hair is technically just as dense as it was before we made this change. But we force blender to restrict how much it shows us in the viewport to prevent the program from becoming too laggy or crashing. We'll still see the full density of the hair in the final render. This is incredibly important when using higher hair density values, which we'll be doing in just a moment, especially on lower powered computers like laptops. If at any point in this class, you notice that blender is becoming too slow to effectively work in it, adjust this viewport value to something smaller. In your case, maybe 0.025 might be better, which is half of the value that we currently have now. Purposes of this lesson, I'm going to leave mine at 0.05, but know that you can always make this view lower, and it won't change the way that the actual final image renders. This is especially important if you have a weaker computer. Now we can increase the density value to a significantly higher value thanks to us lowering the viewport amount first. We can do that over here where it says density. We're going to click on this number and then type in 20 and then zero, zero, zero, three more zeros after this. So 20,000. Hair in the viewport might look pretty much identical to how it looked before, but it's actually about 20 times more dense than it was. It just looks the same because of the lower viewport density that we set. This higher density value will allow us to have a lot more hair and have it fully cover the surface of the fox's head to make a more believable woolly fuzz. Next, we're going to be limiting where the fuzz is allowed to be using a density mask. I've already created this mask for us by using the weight paint tools within the fox head model. Won't be explaining this masking process in depth for this lesson, as I've already handled it for us. For this part in the lesson, you can just watch. Please don't follow along, as this mask is already finished, but it should help to see what this mask looks like and how it will affect the fuzz placement. So first, I need to select the fox head, and then I'm going to go up here. I'll switch it to white paint. And now, if I zoom in here on the fox's head, you'll see generally this whole head is red, except for a few areas such as the nose and around the eyes here. These areas are instead shown in blue with a little bit of green and yellow around them. This bloom means that the density is set to 0% in these areas, meaning that we're telling Blender to not place any fuzz in these areas as they will look a lot better without any hair growing from the eyes or the nose. The areas in red have the density set to 100%, so Blender knows to put as much hair as it wants in those areas. Now that you see what this mask looks like, let's go back to the modifiers and actually apply it so Blender knows not to put any hair in these areas. So first I need to jump back to object mode, and then I'm going to select the short fuzz again, and then we can go back down here. Also adjust this view just so it looks a bit more similar to the left side. So to attach this mask that I just showed you to the density, we can go here where it says density mask. We're going to click on this little icon here on the right side with the plus sign in the middle of it. After clicking this icon, now you can click on this dark field here to the left, and we're going to choose remove fur, which is what I named that mask that I just showed you. This has now applied this mask to the density of our fur. We won't really notice a huge difference to the hair at the moment, but it will become more obvious as we continue. The last adjustment for this modifier is down here and it's called seed. We're going to set our seed to four instead of zero. So we'll just type in four and then hit Enter. The seed value is simply a slider that randomizes the position of the hair. It doesn't change the overall quality of the hair or its density or anything like that. It simply tells blender to redo the hair with a slightly different placement to provide a similar but different look. Change doesn't make a whole lot of sense at the moment. But I found in my experimenting that the seed value in particular created a better look for the short fuzz, especially in the final render. So we're going to use it for now. Now we're ready for our next modifier, so we can twirl this one closed, and then we're going to twirl open curl hair curves. Let's go through the changes one by one, and then we'll explain what we did. So first, we're going to change the factor down to 0.2 and then hit enter. We'll change the curl start to one, the radius to 0.25. And then finally, the frequency to five. We've made quite a few changes here. So let's go through what this modifier does and what each of these sliders we change do for the fuzz. In basic terms, this modifier adds a curl effect to each of the hairs. This will allow us to achieve a similar look to the curls of a woolly fiber. So the factor slider that we changed here, you can think of this as an overall strength of the curling effect. Lower numbers make the hair overall less curly. By lowering this value, we've allowed the hair to spread out more across the head and be less clumped up into large curls. The curl start value found down here, this determines how much of each hair received the curling effect. Higher numbers cause more of the overall hair strand to receive the curling effect. So if you lower this value, that means that less and less of the hair actually receives the curl. So it might start out straight and then curl only at the tip. If you have a higher value like we have here, the hair starts curling immediately from where it grows. The radius value just below it controls how large the individual curls are. If you want really tight, springy curls, smaller values work better here. If you want big, more flowing curls, then you would want a larger radius value. Then lastly, the frequency found down here at the bottom. This slider determines how many curls are present on each strand of hair. Higher values will create the springier curls that we're after. If you wanted less curls overall across the entire hair, you would want a lower value, or if you wanted them even springier and even tighter curls, you would want a higher value. Now we can move on to the frizz hair curves. So we're going to turn this down and then twirl this open here so we can see these values. Let's start by adjusting the values, and then I'll explain what we did. So first, for the distance, we're going to set this to 0.25, the shape, we're going to set 2.05 and then down here, we're going to check on this preserve length button. This frizz modifier adds a zig zag noise to each strand of hair, causing the fuzz to be a lot more chaotic. This help replicates the way that the barbed needle of actual needle felting weaves together the shapes of the fibers. The sliders for this modifier aren't quite as straightforward and obvious, unfortunately. So for the distance value that we changed here, in basic terms, this slider adjusts the amount of friz present in the hair. In general, larger numbers make the hair more frizzy. And then the shape value that we changed here, this slider controls how strong the frize pattern is on each strand of hair. The lower numbers will cause a sharper, more chaotic frizziness. Lastly, probably the most important setting on the frizz hair curves is this preserved length. So if we don't turn this on, we'll notice the hair gets really, really long, and that's because these effects here are being applied on top of all of these other adjustments and making the hair significantly longer than we want it. If we turn on preserved length, that'll make sure that this modifier doesn't affect the length of the hair, only the friz within the hair. So it tells Blender to look at the length of the hair that it was before we started applying these effects and then make sure that it doesn't make it any longer after adjusting these things. Tells Blender to look at the length of the hair before we started making any changes here and then make sure that the hair ends up basically the same length as it was before and not this really long fuzz ball that it turns into without this. So make sure you have preserved length turned on. Now let's move on to the final adjustment that we're going to make, and that's to the hair curves noise. So we can twirl this closed and then twirl open this last modifier here. And we're not really going to be changing a whole lot here. We're just going to be checking on a few boxes. So first, we're going to uncheck cumulative effect, and then we're going to check on preserve length. This hair curves noise modifier is responsible for adding a bit of randomization to the hair overall, making it feel less computer generated and a bit more natural. By unchecking cumulative offset here at the top, we ensure that the randomization of this modifier doesn't go too wild by multiplying with the previous changes on top of themselves. And just like with the frizz hair curves, this preserve length button here at the bottom just tells blender to look at how long the hair was before this modifier and then ensure that after all the changes, it remains roughly that same length. That's it for the changes. So we can go over here until all this closed, and we won't be adjusting this surface to form as this really doesn't have any changes for us. It's just a necessary modifier for this effect to work. So we can leave this one collapsed. Now that we've adjusted all these modifiers, let's just zoom in here, and I'll give you a really quick rundown. Again, just a basic terms of what each of these modifiers are doing for. To begin with, the set hair curves profile is changing how thick the hair is. Next up, we have the trim hair curves. This changes how long the hair is. Then we have the interpolate hair curves. This is primarily adjusting how dense the hair is and also where the hair is allowed to grow. In our case, we told it not to grow in the nose, and we told it to not grow behind the eyes. After that, we adjusted the curl hair curves, which adds a little bit of a corkscrew curl to each of these hairs. We can see that here if we zoom in. A lot of these hairs have kind of a circular curl on them. Then we started adjusting the friz hair curve. Where we're getting a lot of this kind of zig zag pattern. We can see that sort of squiggly pattern here on each of these hairs. And then, lastly, the hair curves noise, adds a little bit of randomness and chaos to the hair to make it feel a bit more natural and less generally computer generated. Okay. So before we end the lesson, let's head over to the rendering workspace and see what this fuzz actually looks like. So I'm going to zoom out here quick, and then we can go over here to the rendering workspace found here at the top. Now we can render our image by going over here and choosing render render image or just by hitting F 12. I'll see you in just a moment when my image finishes rendering. Okay, so the render is done, and it looks interesting. We knew already that the fuzz wouldn't be the correct color, but it does feel a bit different when you see the full effect of all the fuzz on the surface. So we can zoom in here now and see how much more dense this fuzz is. And we can see all these little curly hairs here and how it's frizzy and just all of the different effects kind of coming together to make this overall effect. Even though the fuzz isn't the correct color, it's still really cool to look at the edges of the model and see the curly, fuzzy strands, making the fox's head look almost like woolly felt. We can see an example of that here and just around the faces, especially around the edges where it's the most noticeable. Just imagine how much better this is going to look when it's all the correct color. In the next lesson, we'll create the material for the fuzz that we just added. I'll see you there. 4. Creating the Fuzz Material: In this lesson, we'll create the material for the fuzz that we just added. Let's begin. Now that we have some fuzz added to the fox, it's time to make sure that the colors match the texture underneath. This will not only make the fuzz make a lot more sense for the model it's attached to, but it will also make it appear more dense due to the gaps between each hair being less obvious. So first, let's switch to the shading workspace so that we can begin creating the material. We can find the shading workspace found here at the very top center. We'll also want to switch this top view port to the rendered mode by clicking this button here found on the far right. You can use your mouse wheel here at the top to zoom into the head to get a better look. Okay, so now we're ready to begin creating this material. One thing to note is, I won't be covering every single aspect of creating materials in this lesson. However, you should be able to follow along just fine if you're unfamiliar. I won't be skipping any steps during my explanation. I just won't be going over every single detail as we go. If you'd like to learn more about the ins and outs of material creation and blender, I'd highly recommend my magic of materials class found on Skillshare. We go over all the basics of material creation and blender from a complete beginner's perspective while texturing a premade wizard study file. With that out of the way, let's begin. First, you need to make sure that you have this short fuzz object selected from this list here on the top right. So we'll go over here. We can scroll up in this list until we find the fox head object, twirl open this arrow next to it, and then make sure you have short fuzz selected. Now, down here in this bottom viewport, we're going to check on this button here that says use nodes. This will add two placeholder nodes for us to begin editing if we want to. Those unfamiliar with this node editor at the bottom, we can zoom in and out using our mouse wheel. You can also click in the mouse wheel to pan it left and right, just to slide the view back and forth. Typically, after adding these placeholder nodes, you'd either edit this principled BSDF node found here to make the hair a specific color or you'd add new nodes to adjust the missing properties. In our case, we're actually going to be copying the vast majority of the nodes from a different material and simply reusing them for the fuzz material. Specifically, we'll be copying the notes from the material currently applied to the fox's head object to save ourselves a lot of work. Let's start by selecting the fox's head over here on the right side. We can just select it here in the list. And now down here in the bottom viewport, we can zoom out. Using our mouse wheel and then we're going to drag select over all of these nodes here to the left of this green one. We want all of these nodes selected right here. We won't actually be using all of these nodes, but it'll be easy for us to just delete the unwanted nodes later. Now with these nodes selected, we can hit Control and C to make sure that we copy them and then we'll go over here and select the short fuzz object from the list so we can switch back to this object instead. We're going to hover our mouse over this bottom viewport and hit Control and V to paste those nodes that we just copied. After you paste them, select any one of these nodes here at the top. So if you select on the top color bar of any one of these nodes, you can just click and drag it and then move it over here to the left. We want it left of this green node. Before we hook up these new nodes, let's remove the ones that we don't need first. So we're just going to go through each one of these and delete any node that we don't need. So first, I deselected by just clicking off into this gray area first. Make sure I don't want anything selected. Now we can select this node and hit Delete on our keyboard. We can select this node, hit Delete. We can select this node here on the far left. Delete it. Then lastly, we're going to click and drag over this little tiny dot here. So at the bottom of this purple line, we want to select just this dot here, and then we'll hit Delete again to remove that. So now let's reconnect these nodes. I'm going to zoom in over here on the left side. We can click from this little purple dot on the side of this node and drag it to this purple dot. And then lastly, we'll go over here and drag from this yellow dot to this yellow dot. Now that we have everything connected, let's also take a moment to get everything compact a bit more. Right now, it's all kind of spread out. And again, we can just drag select over things and then click at the top of any one of these and just move them around, get everything a little bit more tidy, less spread out. And just make it easier to work on this material. Okay? So now with all this setup out of the way, we have one new node dad. So hovering over this bottom viewport, we're going to hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu. Go to search, and then we're going to type in attribute. So A, should be enough to bring it up. We're going to choose attribute from the top of the list and then place it here to the left of this purple node here on the bottom. Now we can zoom in where we just place this new node, and we're going to click from this purple dot on vector and drag it over here to this purple dot next to vector on this node. Reason we added this node is to make sure that each hair pulls the correct color from the surface that's attached to below on the fox's head. You'll notice right now that the fuzz is primarily orange regardless of where it's attached. If we zoom in here, we'll see that even in this white area, this fuzz is still orange, and that's because it doesn't know which color to pull from and it's pulling from the wrong area. This attribute node that we just added will force blender to use the correct color for each hair by telling it to use the same UV unwrapped for the fur as the head. In basic terms, the UV for an object just determines how a texture is displayed on the object. Tells us exactly where to place each pixel of the texture. We want to pull from this information to tell the fur which color to be. So to do this, we're going to go over here to this attribute node, and then down here where it says name, we're going to click on this name box. And now we need to type in some very specific text. So you'll have to follow along here, and I will put it up on screen so you can see exactly what I'm typing. So we're going to type surface, all lowercase, underscore UV underscore coordinate. And then hit Enter. By typing in this text down here in the name box, we've told Blender to specifically look at the UV coordinates for the surface that it's attached to, and you will have to make sure that you have it typed in exactly as I have it here. After typing this text in, you'll immediately notice that the hair now matches the color of the surface that it's attached to. So anything here in white shows white hair, and then over here where it's orange or darker brown, you can see that the hair now matches this color. We're nearly done with this material already, but just for the sake of understanding, let's discuss the most important nodes in this material, just so you have a better understanding of what's happening. If we zoom out here so we can see the whole material, this orange node found here named Fox head base color oh one is the hand painted texture that I made for the fox's head. This is where all the colors you see on the head are coming from. I painted this texture directly inside blender using the texture paint workspace. Now if we zoom out, all of these notes here on the top are devoted to adding a felt texture on top of this hand painted texture that we just discussed down here on the bottom. This helps vary the colors a bit more on this hand painted texture and ensures that if we ever see between the gaps and the fuzz, it still looks like there are small fibers below the surface. If you zoom in here on the fox's head, we can see an example of that here. So you can see all these criss crossing lines and dark patterns. This is that fuzz pattern that I've placed on top of the hand painted texture. Okay, so we have a few more changes, and then we're done. So I'm going to zoom out here so we can see a bit more of the head. And then down here in this bottom viewport, we're going to zoom in here on this green node called principled BSDF. This large green node here is generally responsible for the surface properties of this material. So think of things like how see through it is or how reflective it is, that kind of thing is what we control here. We're going to change this IOR value found here near the top. So we'll click on this and we'll set it to 1.3 and then hit enter. Value controls how reflective the material is. In our case, we don't want these hairs to be too shiny and reflective, so we're going to lower this value slightly. Now we're going to move down this list until we see this section here called transmission. So we'll twirl this open, and we have one slider in here. We're going to set this weight slider to 0.5 and then hit enter. This setting controls how see through your material is. It's typically used to make things like glass. We're using this setting to make our hair a little bit see through, so it catches the light in a more realistic way. We did limit this effect to 50%, though, as we don't let the hair too transparent. We can see an example of this here if we zoom in, we'll notice that these hairs in the back here are catching light and allowing the light to shine through them because they are partially see through. And now before we call this material done, we do have one more setting to change regarding the way that the fur receives light. And this actually won't be changed inside the material itself. So we're done in this workspace for now. To get a good idea of why this change is going to be important, first, let's head over to the rendering workspace. We can find that here at the top. So before we do any rendering here, first make sure that you're set to slot one found here at the top right. See all these different slots here. You want to be set to slot one for now. Now we're just going to render our image by going to render render image or by hitting F 12 on your keyboard. Okay, so my render is done, and we can notice already that all of the colors and everything look great. But we'll also notice that the fur looks pretty dark and almost like it would be rough to the touch. It doesn't look particularly soft. This is due to each hair casting shadows on the surfaces beyond them and the hair next to them. All of these shadows add up and make for a much darker appearance that gives a lot more contrast around each hair. This is why we're getting areas like here around the eyes and on the side of the face that are just really dark. We're going to use a setting that allows us to remove the shadows from the fur to help get rid of some of this excess darkness and the rough look. So first, we'll go over here to the layout workspace. And then over here, we're going to go to the object properties tab found on the right. It's this orange square icon. Now we'll scroll down this list until we find the section called visibility, and then we'll go further down the list until we see ray visibility. We'll notice this checkbox here called shadow. We're going to uncheck this shadow box, making sure that you have the short fuzz selected. So make sure that you have this object selected before you uncheck this box so that we're not unchecking the shadows for another object. This will tell blender to not allow the fuzz to cast any shadows. Now that we've made this change, let's go back to our rendering workspace, and then we're going to switch it to slot two up here at the top, just so we can render a different image without overwriting the first one, and now we can go to render render Image. With that simple change, we can now see that we've removed all of that excess shadowing and roughness that we saw earlier while still retaining a soft and fuzzy look for the fox. That's overall just a lot brighter and more cheerful. You can see a difference between these by just switching the slot back to slot one, and we can see how much of a difference it made in the overall look of the render. Now we can also take a moment to appreciate the fact that all of these hairs are also colored the right color based on the surface that they're attached to. So we have white fuzz where we expect it and orange fuzz where we expect it. All of this short fuzz is looking great at this point, but we're not quite done yet. In the next lesson, we'll add an additional layer of longer fuzz to our fox model. I'll see you. 5. Adding the Long Fuzz: In this lesson, we'll add an additional layer of longer fuzz to our fox model. Let's begin. While the short fuzz that we added to our fox's head looks great so far, we can improve the look by adding a thin layer of longer fuzz on top of the short fuzz. This longer fuzz will add small wispy hairs that extend past the edge of the model, giving the head an overall softer appearance. We'll also be using a new tool to comb these longer hairs so that they follow the curves of the head and add even more detail. The process for adding this longer fuzz will be largely identical to the short fuzz. So we're going to be going through this process a lot quicker than the short fuzz that we added first. Won't be stopping to explain each parameter as we've already done that in the previous lesson. After the long fuzz is added, though, we will slow down again and learn how to comb and style it. Okay, let's get everything set up and ready to add the fuzz. First, make sure that you're set to the layout workspace found up here at the top left if you're not there already. Next, we're going to switch this left viewport to the rendered mode by clicking this button here on the far right. Now we're going to go over here to this list on the right side. We're going to scroll down this list until you see Fox head inside the Fox collection, and we're going to twirl this open so we can see the short fuzz object. To hide this for now just by clicking this little eyeball icon here. This will hide it in the viewport, but it won't hide it in the render. We'll turn the short fuzz back on later. But for now, while we're working on the longer fuzz, it's going to be easier if we have the short fuzz hidden. Next, we're going to select the fox head from the list here or just inside the viewport, whichever you prefer. And then while hovering our mouse over here in the right viewport, we'll hit Shift and A, go to curve and then choose fur from the bottom of this list. Before we make any changes, we will rename this. So we're going to double click on this word curves and we'll call this long fuzz and then head Enter. Won't be adjusting the material for this long fuzz until we're done combing it, as the white material actually makes it a lot easier to see in the viewport for now. Now that we have this long fuzz added, let's go through some of the modifiers. So now we can go down here and switch to the modifiers tab so we can see the modifiers applied. Just like last time, we're going to start by collapsing all of these modifiers by clicking these tiny arrows to the left of them, and then we'll be adding one more modifier by going to add Modifier. Choosing search and then typing in trim, TRIM and choosing trim hair curves. Again, we'll collapse this so it's easier to see, and we're going to drag on these little dots here and move it to the third spot in the list from the top. So just below Interpol and above hair curves. Okay, so let's quickly go through each of these modifiers and make any adjustments that we need to. Again, I won't be explaining each of these settings as we've already discussed them in the short fuzz lesson. Feel free to reference that lesson again if you're confused about what any of these settings do. We'll start from the top of the list and then work our way down. So at the very top here, we're going to go to set hair curves profile, and we're going to change the radius to 0.0 005. So three zeros after the decimal point and then hit Enter. Now we can move to our next modifier, so the second in the list. Scroll down a bit so we can see it. And again, we do need to change these in a specific order, just like last time. That way we don't overload blender with too many hairs all at one time. So we're going to start by changing this view port amount first. So we'll set this to 0.1 and then hit Enter. Now we can go to our density, and we'll change that to 60060, zero, zero, and then last, we're going to add the density mask that we had before to prevent it from attaching to the nose or the eyes. So we'll click this symbol here on the right, then click the dark gray box to the left. Choose remove fur. Now we can collapse this and move on to the trim hair curves modifier. And we're going to change the length to 0.165, and then had enter. Okay, so we have two more modifiers to adjust. We'll go down here to hair curves noise. And the only thing we'll adjust here is just the scale. We're going to set this to 0.5 and then had enter. And then one last modifier, we'll collapse this, twirl open friz and then we can uncheck cumulative offset. We're going to switch the distance to 0.03, and then we can check on preserve length. And that's it for our modifier adjustments. So you can either twirl all these open if you'd like, or in my case, I'm just going to leave them all twirled closed, and then I can open them up later if I needed. We've got all the settings for the fur dialed in. So now we're ready to begin combing the hair into place. The point of combing the hair is to make it follow the curves of the head and not just stick straight out of the surface as it is now. This will be a bit of a manual process, and everyone's hair will look a little bit different, which I think is pretty cool. I'll show you how to use the comb and the basic method for combing the hair, but this will be a lot more of a free form process than adding the hair to the head. More or less just be providing you guidance on how to do this, but it's ultimately up to you to comb the hair into place. So our first step is going to be switching into the sculpt mode, which you can find over here in the right viewport. You want to make sure that you can see this drop down list here on the left side. If you can't see this drop down list here where it says Object mode currently, you need to click in your middle mouse button and pan this to the side so you can see all the way over here on the far left, and then we're going to switch to sculpt mode. Sculpt mode will give us access to a bunch of different tools that affect the hair in different ways. Quite a bit of tools, so we won't be going through all of them. But we will be using the comb tool. This comb tool does exactly what it sounds like. It allows us to comb the direction of the hair. We can find the comb tool down here, and it's a symbol here where it has the hair growing up and then being pulled to the right. Your file likely already has this tool selected by default, but if not, and just simply select it here from the list. All of these tools, including the comb tool that we just switched to affect the little white guides on the surface of the head. They're a little bit difficult to see, but if you spin your view to the side and then zoom see here that we have these gray hairs that have that frizzy effect, but then there's these straight white thin lines that poke out of the head as well. These are called guides. When using these tools such as the comb tool, you're not technically moving the hairs. You're instead moving these little white guides that we see here, and then the guides tell the hairs nearby how to react. If you notice when you're using your comb tool, that the hair sometimes doesn't react, it's likely because you've missed one of these guides when combing. So if you comb between these white guides, you might notice that the hair really doesn't do anything, and that's because you're not hitting one of these with the tool. With that brief explanation out of the way, let's start adjusting the hair. Our first step is adjusting the size of the brush. We can do that up here where it says radius. We're going to type in 40 for the radius. So it makes the brush a little bit smaller. This brush size should allow us to be pretty detailed with our combing without needing to be really specific about where the guides. Also notice that as you zoom in and out on this viewport here, that the size of the brush remains consistent. If you're zoomed out further, the brush is going to be functionally larger on this, so it's going to cover more of the model and the more you zoom in, the less of the model it covers. That's important to take into account as well. If you'd like to work on your model a bit closer like this, you might want to set your brush to a larger size such as 80 maybe, and that will allow you to cover a similar amount of area even though you're zoomed in further. As an additional tip, if you'd like to change your brush a little bit more on the fly, you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard on the far right side near roughly where the enter key the left bracket will make it smaller and the right bracket will make it larger. So if you'd like to move around your model and zoom in and out and then just adjust your brush sise on the fly, you can do that as well. I'm going to set mine back down to roughly 40, and I might change it later. Now, all we need to do to begin combing this hair is to simply click and drag on the model. So I'm going to start by zooming out a little bit, rotating my my first goal here is to comb these hairs in the middle up and back, and then the hairs here on either side of the eyebrow to the left or to the right so that they follow the shape of the head. So I'm going to start by just clicking and dragging right here in the center of the eyes and just start pulling this hair back. And we can see as I'm clicking and dragging the hair is moving along with the direction of the brush. Once I have the hair in the middle going back, then I can start combing it off to the side around the eyes. So maybe I'll comb these to the left and then start combing these to the right. And our goal here is to just recognize the flow of the model underneath and to make these hairs here follow a somewhat similar direction. So in real life, this is likely how this hair would flow, so we want the hair on our model to do the same. You can also see how every one of these clicks isn't really moving the hair a whole lot. So sometimes you need to go over an area multiple times and to make sure that you're actually hitting the guides nearby. Unfortunately, due to these hairs being controlled by these white guides, you might find it difficult to comb some of these hairs into place. If this happens, I recommend you just take a moment to look around the area that you want to comb and try to find the closest guide. In this case, if I wanted to comb this area specifically, I can see here that there's a guide there. So I want to click on this guide to have the best effect on the hair nearby. Click somewhere where there isn't a guide at all, it's unlikely that it'll make much change at all. You can see here I'm clicking and dragging. It's not really doing anything. So I recommend when possible, if you're having an issue, try finding the guide near where you want to adjust the hair and then click directly on top of that guide and see what it does to the hair nearby. Also, as a general rule, these guides are a lot easier to effect if you look at them from the side like this. So rather than looking on them straight on like this, you might have better success rotating your view so you're seeing a profile view of these and then just combing along the surface here and seeing how it affects the hair. Also gives you a better idea of how much this hair is actually puffing out from the surface. You don't want your hair going into the model too much. So as an example, if I was combing this hair and I noticed that I moved it too far into the model, you might start noticing that there's kind of a bald spot here. That's something we want to avoid because that's saying that all of these hairs aren't actually poking out from the surface. They're actually growing into the model, which means we won't really see them at all. Areas won't technically be bald because there is going to be a layer of short fuzz here, but we are losing the effect of this longer fuzz that we just added. So we want to avoid areas like this. If this happens, try to find the bald spot on the model and then rotate your view to an angle that's kind of like a profile view here. So I know that this guide is somewhere around here. I'm just going to click on this area and start dragging across it and pulling on it. You might be hard to find it sometimes because the guide is also hidden. That's why this area is bad. Having trouble seeing this guide, you can Alt and Z when you're keyboard to put your model into X ray mode. Now this is allowing me to see through this model slightly, and I can see here this is the guide that I need to effect because it's right in the middle of this bald spot. Now I can rotate my view to a spot where I can actually see the guide pretty well and then start clicking and dragging on it. If you're having difficulty moving this guide too much, you might need to have a bigger brush, so we can make our brush a bit bigger here and maybe adjust your angle. Eventually, you're going to find an angle here that actually affects this hair. You have a particularly stubborn guide like this one seems to be, you might need to actually rotate your view slightly inside the model so that you're on this side of the model before you start adjusting it. So now we're actually inside this head, and it should allow us, we can see here to push this guide outside of it. Don't really worry about what it looks like when you're pushing it out. You just need to get it outside the head. And then once you have it outside the head again, we can rotate around and then fix this problem area. At this point, you might want to turn off the Xray mode, so hit Alt and Z again at the same time. And now we can fix this area here and just be careful not to push it back inside the head again. That I've given you some tips on how to effect these hairs, let's quickly go through some of these areas at a slightly slower pace. Then I'll finish combing the entire head during a time lapse. I won't be talking during this portion, but you will get to watch what I'm doing in a slightly sped up version of the video. During this time lapse, however, I will include a graphic along the side of the screen showing arrows drawn on the head, which give you the direction that all these hairs should ideally be combed. You can use this as a guide of your own or you can follow your own styling if you'd like. As I mentioned earlier, this is a free form process and everybody's head is going to look a little bit different. Don't stress out too much about the details, but if you'd like a little bit more of a guiding hand, you can use my images with the arrows drawn on them as a guide. Once you're happy here with the forehead and you have everything combed upward in the middle and then to the sides above each of the eyebrows, we can then move over here to the ears instead. The ears can be somewhat difficult due to their shape. The goal with the ears is to comb the hair upward toward the tip of the ear at the top. The hairs around the tip of the ear are going to be acting a little bit odd, though, due to the shape of the point that they're attached to. So we'll need to take some special care up there. But for now, I'm just going to focus here on this left ear, and we're going to start combing all the hair on this ear upward towards this point. So you'll find, again, it's a little bit easier to move these hairs when you're looking down the side of them, so I'm just going to start by pulling these hairs upward. And again, just rotate around this view. You'll get a better comb if you can look around the entire ear while you're doing it, not just focusing on one specific spot the entire time. So just kind of move around and move hairs little by little towards the tip of the ear. And all these hairs along the backside should also be moving up. And then don't forget the center of the ear here. We're also going to pull these upward. And do be careful of those bald spots here in the middle of the ear. The center of the ear in the back of the ear here tend to get bald spots pretty easily. So just move the hair little by little, and not moving it too fast will help you avoid that. And then once you're happy with the hair all pointing upward on the ear, we can move on to the tip. I think this is pretty good for this demonstration. So now we can move up here to the tip of the year. So when we reach the tip of this year, we'll notice the hairs kind of go a little wild. They all kind of just go different directions. That's because of this surface. The surface points many different directions, so the hair is going to reflect that. There's going to be a bit of trial and error here as we comb the tips. So we just move slow as you move through this and not move anything too much in one direction. But my advice here for the tips of the ears is to avoid having the hair stick too far out past the tip. In general, we're going to have this hair kind of wrap around this direction from the front and then have the hair on the back side wrap around to the front side, so we're kind of curling it around the tip. Rather than having it just poke straight out into the air because then you get a lot of these really wispy little hairs here, which depending on the animal might be more accurate if you're maybe turning this into a lynx or something like that. It might look pretty good to have a couple wispy hairs poking out here. But for our fox and the look that we're after here, we don't want to have too many tufts of little hair pointing out here, so we're going to kind of wrap these around the tip. And to do this, again, you're just going to have to go kind of slow, and you can see as you move just this one guide here, all these hairs around the tip all start curling around the back. That's kind of what we want, but you can see it moves it really quickly as you're going. Be careful here. Then again, the same thing in the back. We want to move this up and have them curl around the tip of the ear here. Then just keep pushing them around. You don't want the hair to disappear entirely on the tip. You don't want to have a bald spot there, but you don't want it sticking out too far or else it looks a little wild there. This is a good time to just move around the ear and just make sure all these hairs that you're combing are all moving in the same direction. So I think for now, that looks pretty good for this ear. And then the process for this other ear would be identical. I won't be going through that now as it's basically just the same thing. Comb all this stuff upward along the front and the back, and then at the tip, again, we'll just have to move it so that they kind of curl around the tip of the ear to avoid it poking out too far. Okay? With the ear done, let's cover one last tricky area, and that's here right along the front of the face, around the nose and the mouth. The tip of the nose and the front of the mouth have limited guides in this area. So we don't have a whole lot of control over this area, unfortunately. This doesn't mean that we can't comb this hair, though. The goal with all this hair around the nose is to comb it all in a direction away from it. So we want all the hairs above it to move away from it and up, the hairs below it, to move down, and then the hairs along the side to go along the side of the face going back this direction. I mentioned before, the lack of guides in some of these areas will make this a little bit more challenging, but we can still comb it pretty well. So let's start here in the middle, and we're going to comb this guide here right below the nose straight down. So we're just going to grab this and then move it downward. Now above the nose, we can start combing these guides upward. In this case, this guide here is all the way up here between the eyes. That's generally what controls these hairs this far down. So we can start moving that. And then along the side here, we're going to have to find the guide. In this case, it's right here to the left. Start coming these back in space to the left. And this area here is going to be relatively difficult to avoid some bald spots here, especially around the nose. Luckily, that kind of works to our favor here because on a real animal, the hair around the nose and the face and the mouth would be shorter than the hair around the rest of the head. So I wouldn't worry too much if you can't get rid of some of these bald spots that uppear. Try to avoid them if you can, but don't agonize over getting rid of them because you do have somewhat limited control in this area to begin with. Now we can just rotate around to this side. And again, just keep pulling these to the side, pulling them away from the nose, but still making sure that they follow this curvature of the face. So this face here should be moving this way. We can also start pulling some of these guides here below the eye. And our goal here is to just pull all these hairs rather, along the face away from the nose. Everything is moving backwards in space. Once you have a lot of the side stuff done, you can spin around to the bottom and start moving these guides down. Start pulling these back towards the chin. All these guides here can start flowing back basically directly towards the bowtie. And we can see here now, all these hairs are starting to flow away from the nose and the center. If you can find the guides here along the side, you might be able to start splitting them so that they follow left and right underneath. But if you can't find the guide for that or if the one just doesn't exist, I would recommend just combing them down and back. So basically down and underneath the chin like this. And then along the sides here is where you can actually make it follow the left or the right side of the face. So at this point, you should have all your hairs now kind of pointing away from the nose and then following basically the shape of this smile. And as I mentioned before, don't worry too much about these bald spots you're seeing here along the sides of the nose, as these are really difficult to avoid, and ultimately, they do kind of work with the overall fur of this creature anyway. So I really wouldn't worry too much about these. It's important to remember that these longer hairs that we're adding are only there to add further detail to an already dense layer of fuzz below. If there are a few hairs out of place, it really only adds to the cozy handmade feeling of this fox. Okay, so the time has come to speed up a bit and finish combing the rest of the hair. I won't be talking during this part, so feel free to pause the video and catch up whenever you need to. I'll also place some visual guides on the screen to show the direction that I'm combing these hairs. That way, you can use those as a guide for your own combing. Simply follow the direction that the arrows are moving on the face and comb your hair in that same direction. One last word of advice. I'd avoid combing the hairs too close to the surface, as you want to make sure that they sit on top of the short fuzz. When in doubt, let the fuzz be a little bit puffier and longer than you think it needs to be. And you can always go back afterwards and comb the hair down if it's too far out from the model. If you start combing this hair and it's really tight along the surface, you might want to pull the guide out a little bit so that it puffs off the surface a bit more than you think it needs to. As I mentioned, you can always go back afterwards when you turn the short fuzz back on and then start combing this longer fuzz down a little bit, so it's just above the short fuzz length if you want. If you'd really like to, you could also just turn on the short fuzz visibility so you can see how long this hair is roughly. An exact guide of how long it is, but it does help. It will, however, make this view a lot more cluttered and harder to read. So in my case, I'm going to be leaving this off and then just adjusting it afterwards if I need to. All right. I'll see you in a little bit when my fox is fully combed. Don't forget to use the guides along the side of the screen for your own fox. Okay, I have my fox fully combed, and I think he's looking pretty great. We can see here as I spin around, but I mostly just combed everything upward towards the points, especially along the sides of the face. So the face here was combed to these points on the cheek, back to the left, and then back to the right. Anything underneath was combed downward. The back of the head here gets a little bit tricky because generally you want these hairs between the ears to flow up over the top of the head and then backwards this direction through the ears. But then the hair at the bottom here, you want to be combed down and up at the same time. Luckily, it's the back of the head. We're not really going to see this here on this render. I wouldn't worry too much about this area, but it can be a little bit chaotic in this area as you want to start combing it downward this direction, upward this direction, and then backwards this direction. See here, all the hair on the back of my head kind of goes in a little bit of a different direction, but that's kind of a natural sort of chaotic, fuzzy fiber look back there anyway. So I'm not too worried about it. And then, again, the back here, these ears just kind of go upwards towards the tip. And then paying special attention to make sure that the tip of the ears don't go too far out from the tips of the ears here. The fuzz stays pretty close to the edges. You're satisfied with the combing of your hair, you can go up here towards sculpt mode and then switch it back to object mode instead. And we have two last changes to make before we're done with this lesson. Before we make any adjustments, though, let's render the image with just the long fuzz applied so we can see what it looks like overall. So I'm going to go over here and make sure the short fuzz is turned off with both the eyeball, and I'm going to click on this little rendered icon here, so the little camera so make sure it's idden in both views. And now I can go to rendering. And then it doesn't really matter which slot you're on, but I'll switch it back to slot. I'll go to render render Image. Okay, so with our render done, we can now see how much realism this longer fuzz adds to the fox. By combing this fuzz to match the curvature of the head, we've accentuated the underlying model while also giving the overall look of the fuzz some directionality. So it's not just random curls. We can see that especially here in areas like the ears, where this hair clearly follows the shape of the ear, and it's not just random curls everywhere, also along the sides of the face and on the forehead. We can also see here this bald spot that I mentioned that is somewhat difficult to avoid. That really won't matter once we see the short fuzz in this area as well. Really great wispy hairs and kind of a general softer, woolier look along the edges of the model that we didn't have before. All right, so let's make a few final changes before we end the lesson. First up, we're going to apply the correct material to the fuzz, so it matches the underlying colors of the head just like the short fuzz did. We're going to do that by going over here to shading. Then we'll switch this top view port to the rendered mode using this far right button. We can also zoom in on this head so we can get a better look. Next, make sure that you have the long fuzz still selected in this list. And over here, we're going to choose this drop down one that has a little circle with a checker box on it. Click this drop down here, and then we'll choose fur material, the one without the 001 at the end of it, so the one just above it. And then what happened to our fox's head? I'll be completely honest. I haven't quite figured out why this happens, but it obviously has something to do with swapping the default material on this fuzz. Lucky, this is pretty easy to fix. So to fix this quite unsettling looking issue, we're going to go over here to the right side to the modifiers tab. We're going to twirl open the second modifier here, the interpolate hair curves. We're going to go down here where it says UV map. We'll click on this name here, and then we're going to switch it to surface UV coordinate, and then we're going to go back to the top of this list again, click on where it says surface UV coordinate now, and we're going to switch it back to UV map. We'll now see that the fox's head looks correct again, and the fuzz is properly colored based on the underlying texture. So the fuzz is orange where it should be, and it's white where it should be. I'm not 100% certain why this fixes this issue. I suspect it's just telling Blender to reload this map, and that somehow fixes whatever happened while we switched it. But luckily, it's relatively easy to fix, so I won't complain too much. Okay, so we have just a few things left to change. To make this last change, we're going to go over here to the layout workspace found here at the now we want to disable the shadows on the long fuzz just like we did for the short fuzz, because it's going to have the exact same issue. This long fuzz will start casting shadows across the entire head and make the thing overall a little bit too dark and kind of crunchy looking. So we're just going to turn the shadows off entirely. So again, make sure you have the long fuzz still selected. Go down here to the object properties, scroll down this list until you start seeing visibility, and then underneath ray visibility, we're going to uncheck shadow. Then lastly, we're going to go over here to the short fuzz and then turn on both of these check boxes here, so we'll highlight the eyeball and the little camera icon next to it. That's it for this lesson. We'll save the final render of the fox for the next lesson as it'll give me a chance to explain some of the compositing effects currently applied to the render, as well as one additional optional one you can use if you'd like. In the next lesson, we'll render the final image of our fox and discuss some compositing effects. I'll see you there. 6. Rendering the Final Image (and Compositing): In this lesson, we'll render the final image of our fox and discuss some compositing effects. Let's begin. The time has come to render the final image of our little fox to share with our friends and family. We've done all the hard work, so all that's left to do is render the image. Let's start by heading to the rendering workspace found up here at the top center. Now we can render our image by going over here to render, render image or just by hitting F 12. The render is done, and our fox is looking fantastically fuzzy and downright dapper in their little suit. I'm a little bit biased as I designed both the model and the class, but I think they look super cute, and I hope you do too. Before we call it quits on this lesson, let's discuss some of the compositing effects that are happening behind the scenes. This will help you better understand how I achieve the look of the final image and we'll even discuss an optional effect that you can turn on if you'd like. Let's head over to the compositing workspace now found directly to the right of the rendering workspace. Customize this view slightly to make it a bit more useful for our purposes. On the left side, you'll see a bunch of nodes that are responsible for the effects that I added to the image. I've labeled each one of these nodes that their effect on the image is more obvious. We'll discuss each of these nodes in a bit more detail in just a moment. Then over here on the right side, you'll likely see either an empty gray box or an image of the fox that we just rendered. If you don't see the fox render over here in this right view port, go up to the left here where it says backdrop, click this button to turn it on and then click it again to turn it off. That should reload the image so that it pops up over here on the right side. Okay. So what do all these nodes here on the left actually do? First, let's see what the image looks like without any of the effects applied. We can do this by clicking on this little yellow dot here on this far left node. We're going to click here at the top, and we're just going to move it and place it here on this small dot here before the last two nodes. So we're bypassing all of these nodes. Will show us what the actual raw render looks like over here on the right side. Well, notice that the image hasn't changed drastically, but there are some notable differences. Overall, the image is a bit darker. The subtle glow is missing from the highlights and the minimal rainbow blur along the edges of the image is also gone. Let's go through each of these nodes quickly and hook them up so that we can get an idea of what they actually do. First up is this node over here that I have labeled Brighton Image. To connect this back to the image, we're just going to click from this little yellow dot here on the right side of this node. And then drag it over here to this dot here. Now we're only using just this node in the image. Now if we zoom in on this node, we can see here that this is actually called exposure. This exposure node is simply responsible for controlling the exposure of the image. I've increased the exposure down here slightly just to brighten up the image overall. Values higher than zero will make the image brighter and values lower than zero will make the image darker. Next node in the system is here and I've labeled this one glow. Let's connect that to the system. We'll drag from image here at the top over here again to the small dot, and the name of this node is actually glare. So that's what you would search to find it in the list if you needed to. This glare node has a few different modes that add lens flares or subtle glows to the highlights of your image. For this image, I have it set to the fog glow mode. But you can see here there are a few different options. Fall glow mode is one of the more simple options that just adds a soft blurry glow around the brightest areas of the image, such as the tips of the ears or the highlights of the eyes. So if we zoom in over here on the right side of this ear, you can see that there's this kind of soft yellowy glow that extends past the edge of the model, and that's because of this glare node. You might also see it around here, around the edges highlight on the eye, there's just a kind of brightness that sort of emits from these highlights. As a quick example, if I zoom out here, I can bypass this instead to show you what it looks like without it, you can see here all that glow that we see on the eye is now gone. You also saw it lose a little bit of glow down here on the white part of the fur. So if I re enable it, we can see here this glow is now added back to the image. Just helps the bright parts of our image seem even brighter than they were before. Now the last effect that we have applied to the image before was this rainbow blur one that I have labeled here. So before we reenbd this, let's zoom out a little bit. We're going to go down here to the bottom right so we can see these mushrooms, as this is a really obvious place to see this effect. Now let's re enable this effect by dragging from this yellow dot and then dragging it over here. This rainbow blur node is actually called lens distortion. This node does a few different things, but we're using it to add a subtle rainbow blur effect to the edges of the image. The slider responsible for this rainbow effect is the dispersion value found down here on the bottom. See, I have a relatively low value set. If I set this to zero, we can see what it looks like before I added it. So we can see that we have nice sharp edges here, obviously. And then if I set it back to 0.01, we can see the subtle rainbowy blur. It's pretty obvious here on these mushrooms as we're seeing a red and yellow fringe on the top, and then we're seeing kind of a bluish green fringe on the bottom. That's because this effect here is mimicking a real world effect called chromatic aberration in which the glass of the camera lens acts as a prism and splits the white light into separate colors. So that's what it's mimicking this effect here. So we're seeing this white light being split into its different channels. Is also somewhat of an optional effect, but I do think it enhances the overall look of the image and gives it a little bit of realism, as this is an effect that you do see with real world cameras. Even though it's technically a defect, it does add to the realism. We can also see it here on the edges over here. So each of these hairs is just a little bit blurry and the colors are a little bit shifted off of each other. This lens distortion effect only happens along the edges of the image, though. To the very center of this image, you're not really going to see any of this effect, especially at such a low value. At really, really high values, you might start noticing it, but really, you're only seeing this subtle effect here along the very edges of the frame. Okay, so now that we know a little bit about the effects that we already had applied to the render, let's discuss that one last optional effect that adds a fun twist on the image. And that last node is over here to the right side, and I have it labeled painterly effect optional. This node isn't currently connected to the system. You can tell that because there's nothing being output here on the right side. The actual node associated with this effect is called the uahara node. And what this does is it filters your image in a way that makes it resemble somewhat like an oil painting. So let's zoom it here on the right side of our fox. You can see an area that has a lot of different versions of the hair. So some in the back here that are long and some that are short. Now if we drag from the right side of this node up to this dot here to connect it to the system, we'll see the actual effect of this node. So now that we have this Kuahara effect added to the image, we can see that all those fine strands of hair have been much more simplified down into what resembles basically brushstrokes. The whole image has this kind of oil paint filter applied on top of it. It still looks obviously like this has some fuzz and hair to it, but it's a lot less detailed and a bit more stylized, which might be effect that you like. You also have some effect over what this painterly effect looks like on the image by changing these parameters here on the left. So if you adjust this size value to a larger number, you'll notice that this painterly effect becomes a little bit less detailed. Overall, it's a bit more smooth and it's a bit more brush stroke looking. So let's set this back to eight. And if we make the size smaller, it'll make the brush stroke smaller and the image overall will be a bit more detailed. The uniformity value below that changes how rough and granular the brushstroke effect is. If you use a lower value here, such as five, it'll make these brush strokes a bit more rough and a bit more noisy. Overall, this effect is pretty subtle. I'm going to set this back to ten. The sharpness value here controls how sharp the borders between each of these colors and the brush strokes are. If you use a much lower value, such as 0.25, we'll make for a significantly blurrier image. So you can see now that this image has a lot more blur to it, and it looks like the whole image is just kind of being smoothed over with some sort of effect. Leave this set to one. Then lastly, we have somewhat of a complicated effect. The eccentricity controls whether the brush strokes will follow the high contrast edges of the image or whether the brush strokes will just be randomized regardless of the image. If you have a lower value set, you'll tell the brush strokes to just randomly be painted across the image and not really care too much about which direction this edge is flowing. We can see here that the image has almost like a honeycomb pattern across it. However, higher values will tell blender and this effect to follow the edges of the image the best that it can. You'll start seeing more directional brush strokes, ones that actually look like they've been painted upward or downward to match the In general, this effect usually looks better when you have a higher eccentricity value. As I mentioned before, this effect is entirely optional. I can understand why you might not want to use it as it does somewhat minimize the look of the fuzz that we just added. But if you like it, feel free to leave it on. Now I'm going to turn mine off just by bypassing this node and running this last node here to the dot instead. Once you've decided which version of the image that you like the most, or if you'd like to save both of them, you can also do that. We can now save our image. To save the image, all we need to do is go up here to where it says image and then choose Save as. Now navigate to wherever you'd like to save this image on your computer, and then we can change the name down here. So I'll just call this Fox render, underscore final underscore 01, to give it a version number. For the file format, PNG works perfectly fine if you'd like that. Or if you want, you could also switch it to a JPEG, and then I would recommend just turning this quality up to 100%. Either one of these options work. So either JPEG set to 100% or just using the default, PNG works fine, as well. Once you've picked your file format and your name, you can hit Save As Image. You'd also like to save a version of it with this painterly effect applied, you can just reattach this painterly effect and then go over here to Image, Save As. And then, again, we can just click on this to make sure it's using the same name, and down down here, we can add another underscore and then type in painterly, if we'd like, and then hit Save As Image down here to save a second version of the same image, one with the painter effect, and then one without. And now at this point, we're just about done with the class. However, we still have one more topic to cover before we end. In the next lesson, we'll discuss the ways that you can customize this fox render to make it unique to you. I'll see you there. 7. Class Project Ideas: In this lesson, we'll discuss ways that you can customize your Fox render to make it unique to you. Let's begin. We've completed the example for this class, but that doesn't mean that we're done learning. I'd like to give you a few tips and tricks for customizing your render, so you can add a bit of your own style to the image and make it your own. It's important to note that this lesson is just to give you ideas for your own project, so feel free to deviate from what I'm showing you here. You don't need to follow along exactly with what I'm doing. I'm just giving you a few more tools to make your render unique. Before we begin, let's save our file as it exists now. So we have a point to come back to if we want later. To do this, just go over here and choose File. And then save. Now that we've saved the completed class example, we can save a unique class project version of this file so we don't mess up the original. This will give us the freedom to play around without worrying about being able to undo the changes if we don't like them. So to save this new version, we're going to go back to file, and then we'll choose Save As instead. Now, down here at the bottom, we can click on this name to change it. I'd recommend that you just add at the beginning of this file name Class Project. Then put an underscore to separate it. This will just make it obvious what this file is meant for. Once you've changed the name, go over here and just choose Save As. Now we have a fresh file to continue the lesson with. You don't need to open this new class project version of the file. Blender already did that for us when we use the Save As command. Now let's start with a pretty simple change that has a big impact on the image. Color. We'll begin by heading over to the shading workspace found here at the top center. Now in this top view port, make sure it's set to the rendered mode so we can see all the colors in our image. All right, now let's start adjusting the color of the fox and their fur. We'll be doing this with one simple node. However, we will need to copy this node to two different locations so everything works properly. We'll start by adjusting the fox's head material first as that informs the color of the fur, and it's the easiest to see. Start with, we can go over here to the right side. We can twirl open this just so we have it open for later. And we want to select the fox had object. Now down here in this bottom view port, we're going to zoom out a bit. Then we're going to drag select over these two far right nodes, and we're going to move them even further to the right as we want to make some room here between them. Now we can hit Shift and A to bring up the Ad Mnu, go to search, and then we'll type in Hue HUE and choose Hue saturation value. We're going to move this node over here and place it directly on top of this top yellow line. So we'll just click to place it and Blender will automatically connect it for us. Now let's zoom into this node so we can see it a little bit better. This hue saturation value node does exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to adjust these parameters with simple sliders. The most useful slider here will be the hue slider, as it's responsible for controlling what you would consider to be the color of the texture. So if we slide this hue slider back and forth, we'll notice that the color of the material changes. If it's moving a little too fast as you move it back and forth, you can also hold Shift while you click and drag on the slider, and it'll move a lot slower so you have more control. One important caveat of this hue slider is it's really only going to change the orange on this texture. It will pretty much leave the white and any of the really dark black areas relatively unchanged. So you'll notice as you slide it back and forth that there's pretty much always a white part on the bottom of the face. There isn't really any hue here to effect, so this slider doesn't have any effect on it. For this example, I'm going to set my hue to 0.1, and then I'll make a bluish purple fox. Again, feel free to make your color whatever you'd like. I'm just going to use this color here for the purposes of this example. You also have the ability to adjust how saturated these colors are using this next slider. Higher numbers will make the colors more vibrant and lower numbers will make the colors less vibrant and closer to gray. If you wanted to make a white fox for your example, you could just set this saturation all the way down to zero, and that will make it almost entirely white fox, except for some of the darker areas where it means a bit gray. For my example, I'll make the blue a bit more saturated, so I'll set it to 1.25. Lastly, we have the value slider here at the bottom. This slider will control the darkness or the lightness of the color. It's important to note that with this slider, it does actually affect the black and the white areas, as those do have a value to adjust. So if you make it really dark, you'll start getting pretty dark gray here instead of white. Alternatively, you can make it really bright as well to make the white areas even brighter. By default, this slider is going to stop at two if you just slide it to the right. However, you are able to type in values higher than two. So if you type in five, it'll let you go even brighter. For my example, I'm going to set mine to 1.5. So it's just a little bit brighter than it was before. So now that we understand the basic concepts of how to easily change colors on a material, let's apply the same node to the fur material so that it matches the underlying texture. Please make sure that you're happy with the color of your fox's head first, though, as you want these nodes to be identical for both the head and the fur. So our first step is to select this hue saturation value node and then hit Control and C to copy it. Now over here in our list, you're going to select either one of these fuzz objects. It doesn't matter as they both have the same material. So I'll just choose the long fuzz for now. Again, you might need to twirl this open in order to see the long fuzz and the short fuzz underneath the head object. So if you don't see them, it's probably because you need to twirl open this arrow. Now that I have one of these fuzz objects selected, I can zoom out here on the bottom. And then again, I'll be drag selecting over these far to right nodes and then move them over a bit further to the right so I have room for the hue saturation and value. Now I can hit Control and V to paste the hue saturation value that we just adjusted into this material. We can also click and drag this node on top of this yellow line to automatically connect it, and that's it. All the changes that we made to the fox's head have now been applied to the fur attached to it. Due to the fur using the exact same images to color it, the hue saturation and value node has the exact same effect on the fur, making it match the head identically. This point, feel free to head over to the rendering tab and give your image a render. That's where you can really appreciate the new color in all of its fuzzy glory. For now, though, we'll keep going with the lesson. Now that you have a new fuzz color, you might also want to change the eyes, as well. So let's head over here to the Fox collection, and we're going to select the Is from the list. Down here in the bottom viewport, make sure you're set to slot two, which is Iris. If for some reason you're selected on either of these other materials, make sure you select this material, I Iris from the list. Is the material that controls the eye color, which is currently set to green. If we zoom into this material, you notice that we already have a hue saturation value node set here to the left of this green node. So we won't need to add a new one. We can just adjust this one. Simply adjust these three sliders to find a color that you like. For my example, I'll set my values to create a bright pink color. So I'll set my hue all the way up to one, lower my saturation down to 0.8, and then set my value to 1.5. Background color can also be easily changed to a better matching color. Over here in the outliner list, let's roll to the very bottom, and then we're looking for background plane inside the background elements collection. Now we can select it here from the list. For this particular object, the background plane, you will have to select it from the list rather than the viewport, as I currently have the selection locked to prevent accidental selection during the lesson. So the only way to select this right now is to select it here from the list. Now if we go down to the material, can see that this material is much more simple than the previous ones. It simply uses this base color here to change the color of the background. So to change this background color, all you need to do is click on this green box and then use this color picker to choose a new color. You can easily adjust these colors by clicking anywhere on this circle here to move the dot around to the color you like. And then you can also adjust the brightness using this slider here on the right to adjust how bright or dark it is. Render, I'll make mine kind of a dark purple. Alright, let's do one last color change before we move on to a new tip. For this change, we can zoom out a little bit so we can see more of the fox. And then we're going to select either the vest or the bow tie. It doesn't matter they both use the same material right now. So I'll just select the bow tie for now. Now, let's zoom out down here on the bottom. And again, we'll drag select over these two far right nodes, drag them to the right to make some more. We're going to hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu, go to search, and then you can either choose it right from this list or if you need to, you can type it in again, H, UE and choose Hue saturation value. Then again, we'll place it here at the very top on top of this yellow line. Now, let's zoom in so we can see the node better. And then just like for the other materials, go ahead and adjust these values to find a color that you like for this bow tie. I'll make mine a light pink to match the eyes. So I'll set my hue to 0.8 to five, my saturation to 0.9, and then my value to 1.9 to make it a good bit brighter. Once you've found a color that you like, we do actually have one more change to make. So we're going to zoom out and then go down here to where it says sheen at the bottom of this large green note. You'll find out at the very bottom down here and you should see a blue box. The sheen setting here is used to make the fabric look a bit more like fabric. The setting will also appear on the coat and the shirt fabric. If you decide to change them too, be on the lookout there as well. As a quick explainer of what the sheen does, we zoom in now to the bow tie, we can see that these extreme angles here, where the fabric moves backwards in space, we have a whitish blue color, and we can see it around the edges here. That's controlled by the sheen. The color that you place down here in this tint box will have a subtle effect on the material when viewed at these extreme angles. Is an important facet of what makes fabric look like fabric. It's helping to mimic microfibers that catch the light. We want this color to be similar to the overall color of the fabric. However, it's typically a bit brighter than the base fabric. So for this pink bow tie that I made, I would want to change mine to kind of a bright pink. So maybe I'll find a pink color down here and then also brighten it up and maybe make it a little less saturated by moving it towards the center. So, for example, if you use green, you might want to make it more of this color instead. However, for mine, I'll set it back to this light pink. Okay, so now we've changed both the bow tie as well as the vest. But what if you wanted them to be different colors from each other? In that case, we would need to separate the material and make a duplicate of it so that we can adjust them independent of each other. So first, I'm going to select the bow tie again, and it doesn't matter which part of the bow tie I select. There's the knot in the middle, and then there's the bow on the outside. They're technically two different objects, so select either one. Now down here, you'll see next to the word vest, there's a little number four, showing you that this material is currently applied identically to four different objects, the bow on the outside, the knot in the middle, and then both sides of the vest. Make a new duplicate of this material, all we need to do is click on this number four, to tell Blender to make this version of the selected object have a unique version of this texture. So we can see now that it's changed it from vest to vest 0.001, meaning it's a new material. Now let's rename this new material to Bow Tie instead. That way we know what this is actually applied to. Now we can zoom out on the material. Back up to this hue slider and then adjust this to make it a new color. I'm going to make mine more of a yellow color. So I'll set it to 0.95, 1.5, and then two for the value. After you change the color, don't forget to go back down to the sheen and change this tint color to match, as well. So I'll need to make mine more of a warm yellow color. Whichever part of the bow tie that you didn't select still has the old vest material applied to it. So all you'll need to do is select this part in the middle if that's the part that you didn't select and then go down here to the drop down and then choose the new Bowtie material. If you want, you can just type in BOW to filter the list and choose bowtie. And now these both have the same material applied. The two methods that I just showed you for changing the color of the materials can be applied to nearly every object in this scene. So feel free to explore these objects on your own and see what you can customize to your liking. That includes everything from the color of the jacket to the color of the plants or even the stump. Now let's move on to the last tip that I have for you. Another major aspect of this render is the bright and cheerful lighting. The lighting of a render plays a large role in the way that you perceive it and the mood that it conveys. Changing the lighting can have a subtle effect on the render, like just highlighting a different part of the model, or it can completely transform the mood of the render if you go more drastic. Let's cover both of these changes quickly so you know how you can implement them in your own image. We'll start with the simpler option, changing the focus of the render to a new part. This can be achieved by changing the position of the lights that are already there or by eliminating some of the light sources so that the light is more directional. Head back to the layout workspace for these changes found up here at the top left. Next, make sure you have the left viewport set to the rendered mode using this far right button. Now in the outliner list on the far right, we're going to scroll all the way up to the very top and then make sure you have this camera and lights collection twirled open. This is where you'll find, obviously, the camera, as well as all of the lights that are currently in the scene. Before we make any changes, we do need to re enable a few things that I had turned off for us while we worked on the class example. First, let's unlock the selection of all of these lights so that we can actually move them around in the viewport. To do this, we'll go over here and just click on these small arrow icons until they turn white. We'll do that for each of these lights to allow us to actually select them within the viewport. If for some reason you can't see these arrows that I just clicked, go over here to the top right and click on this filter icon and then make sure that this button here is highlighted in blue. Okay? We have one last change now. So over here in the right viewport, if we zoom out and rotate around, notice that you don't really see any lights within this scene. It seems like it's empty. This is because I had them hidden from view so that they didn't clutter our view as we worked. We'll need to re enable them now so that we can see them. To do this, we're going to go up here to this top option bar, click in our middle mouse button and move it all the way over here to the left so that we can see this button here, the view port overlays button. Now we're going to click on this dropdown, go down this list. Going to turn on extras. Once you turn this on, you should now see all the lights show up in your scene. If for some reason you don't see these lights, it's probably because this button here is not turned on. So if it looks like this still, you'll need to click this button and highlight it in blue so that you see all these lights. Alright, so with all of our setup done, let's actually change some lighting. The most simple change that we can make is just to turn off a few of these lights and make the scene a little bit less bright. So as an example, we could go over here to this list and we could hide this light fill by clicking both of these buttons here, so the eyeball, as well as the camera, and then we could also hide this light rim left by clicking the eyeball and the camera. Turning these lights off has had the effect of showing off more of the face's curvature and volume without really changing much at all. This left side now is receiving a lot more shadows from the protrusions on the face. So this nose here appears to stick out further than it used to, as well as the ears looking a lot more deep than they were before. And that's simply just because this area isn't receiving as much also have the option to move around lights in the scene as well. So for this example, I'm going to select this light undersquare main from the list on the right side, and then over here in the Viewport, we can just move this light around using the move tool. You can see as you move this around, the shadows on this image here are changing pretty drastically. So for my example, I'll move it a bit higher, and then I can also change the rotation of this light relatively easily by hovering my mouse over the small yellow dot here at the very end of the light. So you'll see any light that you select here, we have this small dot. If you grab that yellow dot and you position it on something, so just dragging it onto something, it will angle the light towards that object. So if I drag it down here to the head, we'll notice that it now angles directly towards the head instead. We can now see how eliminating a couple lights and moving some others around can change the look of the image. But what if we wanted something a bit more drastic? These changes will help us reshape the mood of the image and give it a completely new feeling. Let's start by hiding all of the lights in the scene by going over here and clicking the eyeball and the camera next to each object here listed with the word light. So we're just going to make the scene entirely dark. Next, we're going to click on this small white folder icon next to camera and lights to make this the default collection. This will ensure that any new light that we add pops into this collection automatically, so we don't have to find it and move it here. Now over here in the right viewport, we can hit Shift and A to bring up our ad menu, go down to light, and then choose point. Now let's use the move tool to move this light up and then just position it off to the side of the face. Somewhere around here is fine. We can see a little bit of the fox illuminated at this point, but it's pretty dim, so let's change that. So over here on the right side, we're going to click on this little green light bulb icon to change the object data properties. This is where we'll change the brightness and the color of the light. Let's start by making the light significantly brighter than it is now. To do this, we're going to change the power value found here. So I'm going to change the power from ten all the way up to 500, so significantly brighter. Can also adjust the color using this color bar found here at the top. In the interest of making my render feel pretty different from the original, I'm going to choose a pretty vibrant color. But as always, feel free to pick whatever color you think looks best for the image that you want to create. In my case, I'll make this kind of a neon blue color. But if you wanted something a bit more natural, sort of like the original, you could pick something down here maybe closer to the orange or the red side. This blue light is certainly different from what we had before, so it works perfectly for changing the mood of the image. Now let's add a second light of a different color somewhere else in the scene. So if my lights still selected over here in the right viewport, you can hit Shift and D to duplicate this light, and then just move it over here to the left side. I'm going to make this light a bit lower and then also move it behind the fox. Somewhere around here is fine. If I wanted more of this left side of the face illuminated still, I could move it further away from the fox so that it catches more lighting. Maybe somewhere around here would work fine, as well. Now that I have a new light over here, I can change the color and the brightness of this one as well. So let's lower the brightness of this one down to half of the other. So 250. And then I'll make this color maybe a bright pink just to offset it. After you have the basic scheme for your lighting setup, feel free to select some of these lights and move them around to better fit the image that you want to create. Maybe I'll move this a bit to the front so I can see more of the face illuminated. I can also move it to the left a bit more. And then don't be afraid to turn on some of these other lights that I had before. Right now, my background is pretty dark, so maybe I'll turn on this light background. So I'll turn on both the eyeball as well as the render icon. I think that's done a pretty good job of completing the lighting for this image. With just these three lights, I've completely transformed the mood and the look of the fox render into something brand new. Obviously, this might not be the vibe that you're going for with your image, but hopefully it gives you some ideas of how you can change your lighting to meet the look that you're after. And now, finally, I'll leave you with the most fulfilling, but also the least guided tip that I have. Create your own character and add some wool fuzz to them. It's really fun seeing your own creations come to life with this fuzzy wooly look that we just explored. Class should have given you enough tools to practice these techniques on your own creations. Even if you're not confident with every aspect of this process, there are a few things more valuable and fulfilling as an artist than to see your skills improve with practice and to see your creations come to life. I can't wait to see what you all create. Congratulations on reaching the end of this mini class. I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for taking my class. Your participation and excitement for learning is incredibly rewarding for me as a teacher, and I can't thank you enough. Now that you've got all these new skills under your belt, I can't wait to see where your creativity takes you. I wish you the best of luck in creating your fuzzy little creations and blender. As I mentioned at the beginning of this class, this class was heavily tied into my previous gnome class, where we used an entirely different method of adding hair using particles to a cute little gnome that we modeled from scratch. If you like this class, you might also enjoy that nome class. Also briefly touch on lighting in this class, which focuses specifically on portrait lighting. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend my portrait lighting master class, where we learn the ins and outs of analyzing references and replicating complex portrait lighting and blender. You can find either of these two relevant classes on my teacher profile. If you enjoyed this mini class, let other students know by leaving a review. Your feedback really helps me understand what you found most valuable in the class. You can leave a review easily by going to the Reviews tab just below this video. Clicking the leave a Review button. I appreciate the support. After leaving a review, you might want to follow me here on Skillshare, as well. You can follow me at any time by clicking the Follow button below this video or by going to my teacher profile and clicking the follow button there. Following me is the best way to get notified when I release a new class or make important announcements. Don't forget to check out my teacher profile for more classes just like this. You might find something else that interests you. Lastly, I want to thank you all again so much for taking my class and supporting me by participating in the class project. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Farewell, and I hope to see you in another class soon.