creating fur images

[markgeorgetwo]

My self i have just got into cutting out and pasting fur coated ladys on pictures of horses .some of my work is on the furphotoartwork site but in all i have over 200 pictures. but i found this time counsuming so what iam after is some to help or tell me what programs to get to add to mydesktop. for i love to share these pictures but iam nervous about putting them on the gallery .that is why i should like to get the proper programs and look at the results. so any help please.

[Worker 11811]

Others will, of course, have their own ways of making fur images but, in my experience, there are four main ways:

1. Cut & Paste: What you've already been doing. Use Photoshop, GIMP or similar programs and cut the fur out of one picture and put it into a second. This works well but you are limited by your source material. If you can't find a picture of fur that's the way you want it, you're out of luck.
    
    
   
2. Photoshop, et. al., Filters: Take an image that you would like to give fur to and select the area you want to work on. (e.g.: The model's non-fur coat.) Apply a "film grain" or a "random noise" filter to the area then immediately apply a "motion blur" filter to the same area without deselecting. The noise filter will make the selected area turn into a sea of small dots. The motion blur filter will stretch them out to look like long hairs.
    
   The problem here is that unless you are careful, the result will LOOK like you blurred the area. It works best on areas that are in the background which are already blurred or out of the depth of field of the camera. It just makes foreground elememts look blurry.
    
    
   
3. Use a 3-D rendering program to actually CREATE fur where there was none. Maya, Lightwave 3-D or Blender would be the programs to use. (Hint: Blender is FREE.)
    
   The drawbacks here are that you have to learn how to use the program(s) and you have to do a lot of work to get the fur to look right. If you do your work well, you can get some pretty damn good results. If you don't, it will look like a mangy dog.
    
   The "Holy Grail" of rendered fur, at this moment, is still the animated charater, "Sully" from the movie "Monsters, Inc." I have made "Sully Fur" with my computer but, let me warn you in advance: You need a FAST computer to render fur and have it look good. The legends say that it takes over an HOUR to render one frame of a fur image at the quality level seen in those Pixar films! And, Pixar can spend millions of dollars on the project and they can take several YEARS to make a full movie.
    
   Moral of the story: Don't get illusions of creating "Sully Fur" unless you're willing to throw some serious time at it.
    
    
   
4. Draw or paint the fur: Sounds simple but, if you can draw or paint you wouldn't be asking the question, now. Would you?
    
   Maybe one of our resident artists can give us some thoughts about this... ToS?