So i’ve been working on a project that needs to have a few words that look realistically hairy, to do this i’ve been using the layer mask/work path method (more or less this method https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgFPPoKvWeU) and the results are looking alright, but a “better from a distance” sort of alright:
I was wondering if there were any ways to make it look dead on realistic?
“Realistic” is all in being able to “see.” And not using the Easy Buttons in photoshop.
Sometimes it means taking a real hard look at what something looks like in real life.
I didn’t look at the tut, but the problem starts with that is not how a furred piece of leather or a piece of faux fur would cut.
Best thing you could do is go to a craft store and get a small piece so you can really see what it should look like.
Or you could look at these (these are real fur scraps)
The longer guard hairs wouldn’t just start out of nowhere and end chopped off unless you cut through them straight with scissors. Where the hair starts you wouldn’t have furries sticking out like that, and where it ends, you would have longer uneven hairs. The sides, depending on how you cut the piece would either have clipped hairs, or if you ran the scissor points under the hair and just cut the base fabric, the hairs would stick out in the direction of the flow.
If you want the letters to look like they are wrapped in fur, then in that case the guard hairs would splay out along the wrap in an uneven look similar to the flow end. Not uniformly spiky like a photoshop jaggy filter.
Something like the image below that I found on the intertoobs. See how the top is wrapped and the fur splays upwards? The hair off the sides flows downward as well as out and the fur at the bottom hangs off the end of the flow where it curves back under the box?
There are no hairs mysteriously starting out of nowhere there.
nice work! but use black hair for better pic
What if the fur you are representing isn’t black?
I’d recommend using the smudge brush tool to pull wisps out of the edge of the letters following the lines of the fur sample, or using the Channels technique shown on this page… https://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/articles/photoshop-masking-techniques-everyone-should-know
to mask out a section of real fur with wisps, then use that to outline the edge of the letterforms.
