Due to a lull at work, I found myself with some free time.
So I decided to 3d model a furby because I couldn’t find a decent one online.
It came out ok in the end. But the process came with quite a bit of nightmare fuel.
I first did as much as I could without having to touch the hair sim. I had no idea how to do hair sim.
But I “luckily” found a quick hair sim button in blender. So that was looking quite nice. However I was a fool. I hadn’t yet touched any sliders on the hair particle system. And i still needed to add colour.
This should have been my first warning. I had to hide the face plate, so i could remove some of the hair bits that were clipping it. I wasn’t prepared.
Then I decided I wanted to have another bit of light hair on top. simply add a square under the hair and press the hair sim button.
I don’t know exactly how I managed this, but somehow i had made the particle system use the data from the gravity sim to generate more hair.
I made the mistake of zooming out.
My computer didn’t like that. The hair, It just kept going, but the more I zoomed out the more my computer slowed down. So this is as far as i was willing to push it.
After fixing that issue I put a bit more effort prettying the model up. First I added colour to the faceplate and its different parts, then I cooked up a quick and dirty procedural texture for the eyes.
finally I made a front hair sim for the white belly, this led to another problem. at some point the baked physics started getting…
no mater what I did the hair would just start growing a few frames in.
I tried everything I could! I scrapped the physics bake, I trawled through all the particle systems sliders. I changed numbers randomly. I even did a full uv unwrap, which I had been avoiding. nothing fixed it.
I really didn’t want to end up with something not a furby at the end of all this work. so i kept looking for a solution.
Then i found out it animated.
In the end I just saved the file (I’d realized I hadn’t saved once up until that point. almost had heart attack when it froze for a few seconds while saving), then closed and reopened blender. Of course the old, “turn it off then on again” worked perfectly.
So there you go, I now have a slightly cursed furby 3d model.