While going through and making a few updates to my models, I realized I never updated the material used on Applejack's hat. I was originally going to make a procedural textured leather material, similar to what it was before, but then it was pointed out to me that the ponies probably wouldn't use leather. So I did a bunch of research on cowboy hats, finding that textured leather hats are kind of uncommon anyways. Instead they're usually made of suede or felt, which is actually still made from leather! Which is what I was trying to avoid, unless you use a faux suede made from polyester which I doubt the ponies have. I found one more kind of hat material called Oilcloth which didn't seem to be from completely from animals and kind of has a suede look, but it's a material more used on safari type hats. I already had enough progress on a felt/suede material so that's what I ended up going with, and it seems to be the most common material on cowboy hats anyways. BTW, Applejack's hat is often refereed to as a stetson like it's a style of hat when really it's actually a brand name, which seems weird to mention and imply exists in Equestria. While I think I made a pretty decent felt material, it's really hard to recreate the effect felt has when you draw on it and the way light hits it can invert the light and dark colours.





I wanted to show off the material somehow so I made this little scene, spending more time on it than I should've, and then spending a lot of time Colour Correcting it; something I haven't really done in Blender before but I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I went and threw in some apples I made during The Egg Hunt.







Ironically with all the time I put into making this scene it still doesn't show the texture of the smudges on it very well. I have these others renders that do a better job of showing it off.





EDIT: I released an updated version where I slightly changed the material, making the texture more fine, adding some little bump imperfections like I noticed in some references and added some spots where the texture has extra distortion. I also rendered it in 5K instead of 4K.







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CreatorOfPony Applejack Model and Hat originally by// Modified by me





Rendered using Blender Cycles 2.82 at 5120x2880 with 1000 samples using a GTX 970 in 1h48m