Fur ball made with my shell-based technique add-on for Blender.
Here we achieve dense fur by drawing multiple cross-sections of the hair on multiple instances of the mesh. To do this, we duplicate the sphere and inflate its surface slightly, texturing it with the same hair texture each time, but decreasing the alpha clipping threshold with its index. We repeat the process 35 times, adding more layers, called shells. Hence the name of the technique. Each shell lays slightly above the other, more transparent each time.
The fur is a noise texture, used to clip the alpha of each shell. The noise is colored to match the depth of the hairs.
To be able to export it easily on Sketchab, each shell has its UV unwrapped in a grid pattern and a 4K texture is baked, making the final texture looking like a stamp sheet. It’s cleaner in shader, where the clipping is dynamic, using the shell index to multiply its alpha value.
Animated by rotating shells with a keyframe offset matching shell depth
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