Creating “Spline Guides” and “Mesh Guides”

Mesh that generates the fur can be a skinned mesh or a static mesh. When using free gFur, only skinned meshes are supported. There are two options to style the look of the fur – splines and meshes. Seems like currently splines can be reliably generated and exported only from 3ds Max. We will try to add some more options later.

There are two basic requirements for spline guides to work in any 3D app:
• splines have to “grow” from vertexes of the mesh (not from faces or edges)
• the 3d application has to be able to export splines into the fbx file format without conversion to geometry

Mesh guides are exported as separate skinned meshes, but they have to have the same vertex ID’s as the mesh that will be used to grow the mesh. Easy verification for a correct guide mesh is that these have to work as morph targets in the 3D application. This serves only as a way to check for errors, meshes are not exported as morph targets, but rather as separate meshes skinned to the same bones as the mesh that will be used to grow the fur.