The Gnomon Workshop – Creating Creature Fur Using XGen & Arnold

Discover how to create creature fur from scratch in Maya using XGen and Arnold with Creature FX Artist Bruno Tornisielo. This 2.5-hour workshop details Bruno’s process for crafting believable hair and fur, starting with a simple sphere to demonstrate XGen's fundamental tools and principles. Bruno reveals all the important tools needed to create curves and modifiers and discusses how to create clumps, cuts, noise, and curls.

With the foundations covered, Bruno covers the importance of separating the groom into layers to gain complete control over the groom. He shares the entire process for creating all the guides and layers for the full groom and demonstrates the modifiers required for each layer before walking through his light rig and shaders. Bruno also details how to paint maps using ZBrush as an added bonus. The workflow follows through to the final render in Arnold and shows how to create an interactive groom for your portfolio.

This workshop is designed for artists looking to learn the basics of XGen as well as those interested in learning how to create realistic animal and creature grooms. This tutorial is packed with useful grooming tips and provides a comprehensive overview of Bruno’s production workflow, as used for creating realistic creature grooms for feature films.

Bruno has provided his XGen Expressions .txt file as a downloadable resource with this workshop, which is available to subscribers.