Advanced Fur Shader

I’m really not. The tools here are doing most of the work. There is some skill in looking at lots of reference to figure out how subtle shapes of the big cat, but beyond that I am just projecting the colors from reference photos – and the great thing about the way your shader works is that the color map can be pretty blotchy and imprecise but it ends up looking really good. So I can very rapidly lay down different colors just by projecting real photos of cougars onto the mesh, and I don’t have to be careful about hiding seams or nothing. Really a pleasure to work this way as I can try out different ideas very rapidly.