it may be that unless the view is close enough to notice individual bristles, just making a texture which simulates it will suffice. i've been playing with rendering a large lounge space which was originally going to use bristle tiles but when viewing the room, all the minute details simply blurred together after rendering and anti-aliasing for 20 hours, so a texture replaced it and the rendering time was then reasonable and the results were ok. we've since moved on in terms of aesthetics. recommendation - you'll have to play with different views to determine if complex geometry and materials does it, or simply seamless texture.
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