I suggest you test a lot to find your balance between:

amount of hairs in every group,
thickness of root/tip of strands,
amount of verts - you can go as low as 6 and still be able to style quite well
Do the styling carefully and you will be able to have less hair which will cost less in power when rendering. The lighting is also important for the "scalp" not to show through.

Very impressive! I saw Moonrose's textures... You must have used the hair in Poser. How did you get the variation in texture? I have MilDog and will play with that figure, but I'm at a loss at how you got the variety of colors for the fur.

You can give Poser's hair materials just like any other object. Couple that with the ability to group hair in patches or zones and you can get some nice layering/variation going on. 

Meant to add:

Great work there you two!

Yes, it is the dynamic hair used as fur.

To get the variation for the fur you apply the body textures to the fur too.

MilDog is a very heavy mesh and I had to quit my project of creating a furred dog using it. I constantly ran into crashes and other problems. But it would be nice if you can make it work.

Here is a LINK to thethread about the furred dog project.

I tried applying the wolf texture to the fur but don't see how it can tell where to apply the texture to the fur... as in, does it apply texture to the entire strand, of just the tip, and if so *just the tip:" then how does it know where on the mesh is that color or variation?

Without looking at the other thread, Tiny.. Wouldn't it be possible to sorta make a lower rez "skullcap" for the dogs? Like a bodysuit? (and yes I realise it would have to be made either with the same morphs as the mill dog, or one "suit" for each breed, but...)

Just an idea. The furry cats are so awesome, it would be cool to have something similar for the dog

Well, I finally say your post Tiny, and I just want to say - What a lot of work! You've already done it! Where can I purchase the dog pack? Looks great. R

ominousplay, I had lots of problems with the Mildog and the fur. The conclusion is that the mesh is too heavy.
When creating a product to be sold it has to be able to handle all situations like posing, morphing, animating, styling fur, etc. And preferably on "weaker" computers too. So I placed the dog project "on ice" for now.

About the texture on the fur.
In material room you select each hair group in the list (one by one, they are listed as props) and apply the texture to it (maybe just copy and paste from the body texture settings).

TrekkieGrrrl,

Quote - Without looking at the other thread, Tiny.. Wouldn't it be possible to sorta make a lower rez "skullcap" for the dogs? Like a bodysuit? (and yes I realise it would have to be made either with the same morphs as the mill dog, or one "suit" for each breed, but...)

Just an idea. The furry cats are so awesome, it would be cool to have something similar for the dog

It is a good idea and I have been thinking in the same lines TrekkieGrrrl. Have even made some testing. It would be the ultimate solution distribution wise. The only thing I would need help with would be making it conforming.

Making it conforming shouldn't be too hard. Perhaps you could even do something like the Mad Scientist hair (I've used that approach a few times since I saw it) - so Pokethru doesn't NEED to be an issue. If the "bodysuit" is made transparent so only the fur can be seen... 

hmm.. PhilC needs to expand the supported characters for OBJ2CR2 to the mill dog :biggrin:

One issue though is when running the automatic Recalculate Dynamic Hair which, depending on styling of course,  will follow the prop it is attached to. And setting the collision on will be too heavy for most computers I think because mine usually crash or freeze then.
So the hair prop must follow the animal mesh as closely as possible to avoid strange calculations.
Concidering that I figured it may be easier to simply create a new dog from scratch. We are then looking at a 10 year project for me...

And yes, PhilC absolutely have to fix that!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2121224

ominousplay, you are doing good so far, it looks nice.

One work around way of changing the fur texture is to open the cr2 file in a text editor (for example EditPad Lite which is free and can handle big files easy). Then do a search and replace with the new texture name.
Example:
Open the cr2 file in EditPad Lite.
Search for .jpg (gives the first instans of the texture file) - you'll get for example 'greywolf.jpg'
Replace all 'greywolf.jpg' with your new texture, for example 'blackwolf.jpg'
Save the cr2 with another name.
Done.

Be sure to have the correct file path for the new texture incase it is not in the same directory as the previous texture.

Tiny, were you successful at copying the textures to each prop at once? There is a choice in the simple - not advanced - part of the texture room that let you copy to all props or zones, but I didn't have success. Also, I didn't try changing the morph to a different dog to see if the hair followed. I think it will, since I adjusted ears and pose and the props followed. Be happy to send you the file if you want to play around with it. I'm running an eMac 1.25 gig with 1 gig ram with Poser6 and I added fur to the MilDog - without the other morphs from Moonrose. Just the Mildog with Wolf morph at 1.0. I can't send till I get home from work. We're finally getting snow in Anchorage, Alaska! We've had a record cold snap with no snow. The lakes were frozen but clear. You could walk on water, and see all the way to the bottom!

Quote - Tiny, were you successful at copying the textures to each prop at once?

Try my suggestion using the text editor, it works best.

I'm on a PC (used to work on Macs though and still have one), will the file work on a PC? Be glad to take a look at it.

It seems you are as far north as I am if not further. Sound wonderful!
I live an hour drive south of the arctic circle.
We are having a bad start of the winter - it is raining! But they promised better weather at the end of the week, hopefully with some snow and minus degrees. Can't stand the rain in the winter time.

This has the advantage that it renders lightning fast compared to dynamic hair, but doesn't look as good.

Very impressive! Can you post the math? Is it actually displacing the mesh or is it a bump? I like the effects, would be great for figures in the distance.

Now I'm looking for a text editor that works with the Mac. I have Bbedit Lite and various html editors, but none seem to give clean text. The cr2 files read as ".crz" files now on my computer... upgrade to Poser6 seeded to change file extensions. I even tried changing the extensions to .txt, .cr2, etc. with no luck. The files open as lines of garbage text. Anyone using a Mac and some type of text editor that works for these .cr2 files? Hopefully something free : ) and easy. thanks in advance

Attached Link: http://www.barebones.com

Thank you stewer, I played around and was able to decompress using dropstuff expander. Then I just save the edited .cr2 back to the Poser library and I'm back in business? I downloaded TextWrangler - thanks. R

I've used displacement mapping several times to get fur-like effects. A good bitmap, giving the right sort of hair pattern, helps a lot, although noise and the like can do a good job. Some discussion towards the end of this thread

I found it easy to edit the cr2 file and replace all texture references to another, a lot faster than copy and paste.  But I did find that I had to do it several times to get all instances... it missed several the first time around.  While it made for an interesting texture - half and half in some areas of the models - it was not what I wanted.  I'm rendering 3 wolves now, all different textures - white, gray, and black - all furred.  Hope I don't kill my poor eMac.

Thanks for all the help.
R

Personally I hope this discussion opens the possibility of the furry dog project's return. Hopefully Tiny can work out all the problems with it.

Wow, rendering three at the same time.  My poor machine won't even open a pz3 file if it has a furry cat in it.  I don't even want to imagine what it would do if I asked it to render a group of furry critters.

At any rate, Thank you Tiny for making the furry cat possible!

Lot of good info here.  Sharen

ominousplay, the editor program missing some textures - I have not had this problem with the app I'm using. It doesn't have anything to do with the Poser file. Make sure the cursor is at the very top of the document when starting the 'Search and Replace' routine.

Would you mind trying the 'Calculate dynamic hair' (when your render is done) on one of your wolfs? Select 'Animation > Recalculate Dynamics > All Hair' and let it calculate the hair for the current pose. This is one of the situations where I run into problems with my dogs.
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Nvlonewulf**, thank you for the kind words! Made my day.

Try this when having problems with the pz3 file loading:
Poser saves a path to .dyn files and when loading the pz3 file Poser looks through every instanse of this path to find the .dyn file. This takes eons of times and sometimes it just won't open at all. There is a work around for this (if you have the patients) - open the pz3 file in a text editor. Search for 'hairCacheFile' and delete the whole line. It should be as many as the hair groups on the animal, for the cat I think it is 48 or something like that. Save the file and I'm sure the cat will load, and faster.

I would really love to be able to get the dog "behaving and stable" for all systems. I have remade it approx. 10 times with different approaches, styling and all, but it will not be stable enough to release.
Come to think, I have just cleaned out my computer, formatted and everything is fresh so maybe I should give it another try. On the other hand one shouldn't have to format and clear the computer to be able to use the dog. :blink:

You guys with the patience to mess with hair/fur in Poser6 are made out of iron.  I hate working with cloth bad enough as it is, trying to work with dynamic hair is just a tooth grinding experience.  Golfclap  ;)

And closer in - took 1 minute this time :-)

Looks great! I am impressed with the time you are saving. Are you using a bump map to modify where you "grow" the hair?

Thanks Tiny for letting me know how to open those files!  Very handy to know.

Wow, these are wonderful.  Sharen

For short fur this probably produces as good results as the hair room for a fraction of the render time. Not so good for longer fur though :-)

Thanks, I will try that! bB

I must be doing something wrong, mine comes out way to light for the texture map, and too long.  I like the effect you just did third10, can you post your settings.  Sharen

Here are the material settings

And here is the 'bump' map used to modify the noise. I then used here a setting of 0.05 on the displacement channel, a larger value gives longer 'fur'.

Thank you so much, I will give that a try.  Sharen

Poser 6 has a node which does subsurface scattering (fastscatter, I think), and that might be worth adding to give the effect of light passing through the fur.

I calculated the fur for a singel frame and it took about 3 min. I then created a 30 frame run annimation and calculated, it crashed after 15 min. So, I think it is okay for still but maybe too much for my computer. I am happy to post the furred figure, but don't know the rules behind posting - I am using MilDog and Poser6, with loads of fur props. Guess I'll have to host it on my one site. This will have to happen tomorrow. R

Sharen, that is very cute!

ominousplay, thanks for trying the dynamic calculation.

For distributing the dog you'll need an encoder program that asks for the Mildog object. For example RTE encoder for PC I'm not sure what is available for Mac though, you'll have to do a search or create a new post asking about it.
Be sure to mention in the products info about the crash when calculating hair in animation.

Did you style the fur or is it pointing straight out from the body?
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Sams3D - what a cute outfit. I saw those costumes some time ago, but lost track. Do yo still know where to pick those up? Tiny, I thought I could just post the .pzz file and anyone with MilDog and expansion pack could use it. Am I wrong? I think I pulled the hair back, but didn't style too much. R

Attached Link: http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=4628

Sharen

ominousplay, below is the general principle from DAZ when it comes to characters and distributing them. It says Victoria but it goes for the other characters too.

HERE is a link to a thread about distributing. There are other threads too but I think you get the idea. 
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Characters and Scenes - CR2 and PZ3 files**

A Victoria 3 CR2 file containing -by means of Delta Injection or otherwise- DAZ created morphs cannot be distributed, whether the DAZ morphs are included in whole or in part, or in combination with some custom morph element. PZ3 files created involving such characters will also contain this data, and so cannot be redistributed either. [A PZ3 file contains the entire CR2 file(s)]

Because Victoria 3 CR2s are only distributable without DAZ morphs included (even derivative morphs), character add-on creators must rely on the end user to own and inject these morphs themselves, or create a readScript file to inject the morph(s) for them. [See methods of distribution below]

DAZ maintains a policy that allows the distribution of most products' CR2 files in order to facilitate the creation of complimentary products by 3rd party developers, as described above. For products with non-distributable CR2 files, DAZ provides a distributable version of the CR2 for this purpose.

However, as always, the content of DAZ's CR2 (and other) files remain our proprietary data, and the use of this data in the creation of derivative, competitive products is prohibited. In the case of our human figures this means that the CR2 data may be used freely for the purpose of creating figure add-ons (such as clothing, etc.), but may not be used for the purpose of creating another humanoid figure, which could compete with the original. Please note that Geometry contained in the OBJ files may not be used to create any derivative model, add-on or otherwise.