Dandelion design

without shadows

Just finished with modeling, texturing and "furring" my latest model of a dandelion.  This will contain the same colors and shapes as the other design - cyan, violate, white and orange as well as cubes, spheres and cones.

However, I am having some issues that I need to work out.  I like the shadows I get on the ground, but you can see there are some shadows that the fur picks up that looks bad.  I don't know how to separate that out.

"fur" with shadows

There's no way to "unlink" lights to fur like you can other objects and you're supposed to be able to separate that out in rendering under the fur and/or light attributes, but I don't see it (I think that's a new addition and I'm using Maya 2009...cause I'm poor).

It looks like I'm going to have to work this out in compositing.  Last time I did shadows separate I had a hard time working it out.  So, something new to learn.

Also, the rendering times are pretty extreme.  The last model had about 30 seconds of rendering time per frame (that was full HD).  These renders were just for 640x480 (less then 1/4 of HD) and fur without shadows took 1 minute 13 seconds and 2 minutes 40 with fur.  Separating them out in comp will fix that, but I still need to figure out how to make it all shorter.

cyan "petals" with violate "fur" - rejected idea

Another thing I was trying was using different colors on the fur then what is on the geometry.  It looks kind of interesting, but I don't think it looks quite right.

Well, there's still a long way to go.  I just have two models rigged and ready for animation.  By the end I'm a little worried about rendering times and more worried about having too much geometry for Maya to even run without crashing constantly.

On another note, I just have to add how frustrating it is that what I am doing is extremely complex and for "experimental cinema" it's quite advanced, but even at this stage in the animation and VFX world this is really low tech.  Not to mention how in the experimental cinema world they don't care too much for animation of this kind.