Alien Skin's "Eye Candy 4000" is a plugin set that contains many very useful and cool plugins for creating all kinds of different effects. The one in particular that caught my eye was the Fur filter. When used the correct way, you can simulate realistic fur in all your pictures. The following process is a bit tedious, however, so be prepared to spend a while.

As in the first part of this tutorial, you should have a layer named "Fur" that is filled with 50% gray in the shape of the area you want the fur to be. While it takes a lot more work, I recommend doing the first part before doing this one. While this filter works great, chances are you are going to miss a few areas, which the "smudge method" will be sure to cover up for you.

Hopefully, you are familiar by now with the direction that fur grows in across the body. This is crucial to making this proceedure work correctly.

You will now use the Lasso Tool to select small parts of the image to apply the fur filter to. You can only select small parts because of the way the filter works.

Before going to the filter, make sure that the "Lock Layer Transparency" is turned off. All Eye Candy filters require editable transparency, and you"ll receive an error dialogue telling you this. If you forgot how to unlock layer transparency, look at your LAYERS palette and you"ll notice the word LOCK, and right next to it, a small checkered button. That is the button you want to click.

Now, go to FILTER - EYE CANDY 4000 - FUR to activate the filter. It will bring up a window like the one you see below.

The first thing you'll want to do is uncheck the option that says "Color Hairs Uniformly". Having this on stands out way too much. Okay, now to describe what everything does. Please note before starting, there is no one "magic setting" that will work for every picture you try to do. Every time you use this filter, it will require some experimentation on your part, so expect things to change quite frequently.

On the Basic tab, you'll see the circle with a dot you can move around. This changes the Direction that the fur is growing. Obviously, you"re going to want to point it in the direction that it would grow in real life. You can use the "smudge method" step as a guide.

The Density slider increases how many individual strands of fur appear in your selection. The more you add, the thicker the pelt will appear. I usually put this option all the way up.

The Curl Size slider adds curliness to your fur. You DO want this on, even if your fur won't be curly. Generally, you"d want to make the curl size pretty large. This makes sure that there is some movement in the fur, instead of looking completely flat. 115 is a good amount for this picture.

The Curliness slider obviously adds more curls. This is useful when you have the Curl Size slider set to a higher number. Reducing this slider to zero will result in a very flat-looking fur effect, almost like wood grain. It doesn"t look very good at all.

The Length slider of course makes the individual strands of fur longer or shorter, depending on if you increase or decrease the amount.

The Draw Only Inside Selection checkbox makes sure that fur does not extend past the selection border. Sometimes this is good, but others, bad. You'll want to use this option if you are making fur on the edge of your drawing and do not want it to go onto the background area. However, if you are doing fur on the inside of your image, like I have in the picture above, you can keep this off, since it helps to blend the fur into the other areas I will do later.

The Color Hairs Uniformly checkbox makes the fur one solid color. I never use this option, as it looks horrible, and you"ll only need grayscale for this effect to work anyhow. The Hair Color by the color picker is used for this feature.

The Seamless Tile checkbox makes sure that the image can be tiled, that is to say, all the edges match up. You can use this to make tiling website backgrounds or whatever. Leave this off for this tutorial.

Finally, the Random Seed button will change the "seed", that is, the area the fur "originates" from. Use this if you aren"t satisfied with the way the fur is growing out. You may get much better results with a few clicks.

On the Lighting tab, you'll see a few more options for controling the lighting of the fur.

The Light Direction works the same as the fur Direction on the Basic tab. Slide the light source around until it looks natural. You don"t want a lot of white in the fur, but you do want just enough to give it the impression of depth, somewhat like the picture above.

The Highlight Brigtness slider just increases the Highlight Color, which you can change from the color picker.

As you can see to the image to the right, the fur looks much sharper and cleaner than the smudge method, and it even has highlights. Continue selecting small areas of your image and repeat this process until you"re done. That"s all there is to it. Like I said, it"s tedious work, but the end result is pretty much worth it.