Getting Realistic Results from Maya Fur

[anthonyevans847]

To make dynamic attractors collide with your geometry, you can select all the attractor particles objects, and then shift select your geometry and "make collide" from the menu. As for the dynamics, make sure you tweak the conserve and the goal weight on your particles.

Also, if Maya fur doesnt do what you want, you can try Shave and a Haircut (link (http://www.joealter.com)), its currently the best Hair/Fur system available, and integrates very well with Mayas dynamics (none of this attractor mess), but its quite pricey if you already paid for Maya Unlimited.

Tony

[colintheys]

Thanks for the tip. Embarrassingly, that was actually what I had tried to do in the first place (I mean it would seem to make sense right?) However I must have done something wrong, as I could not get it to work before for my life, but now it's working fine. (Computers. sigh) So now I'll play with this for a while and see what I can get it to do. grumble grumble. Thanks!

[colintheys]

Alright, I played around a lot last night and this morning, and I think I've narrowed my concerns a bit. I've got the fur behaving basically the way I want, if I set a direction for it. ie, if I follow the manual's examples and use the arrtractors to create relatively minor changes to fur that is already facing the proper direction.
However, I need this ball of fur to be able to roate in any direction and still have the fur behave properly. ie it can't have a "top." Thus, I need the fur to stick straight out, but to follow the attractors and hang in the direction of the gravity. So, basically, what I need is to have the attractors return to their normal positions when there is no force acting on them. So, when you blow on it, it bends, but when you stop, it sticks straight up again. I tried adjusting the spring attributes, but couldn't seem to get it to work that way. I also tried adding new springs, but that just looked bad.
I added a weak radial field right in the middle of the object, and that pretty much accomplished the effect I want, but that's seems like an awfully lame solution, as it only works in this paticular instance. Now the fur hangs down, but if the wind blows, it can be depressed further. I have the feeling I'm overlooking something obvious. :/

[anthonyevans847]

The dynamic attractors each have two particle objects, which have goals set in the local space of the surface the attractors are on.

Set your selection mask to select all the particles and select them all, and now use some simple MEL loop to set all their goal weights to a higher value and maybe some tweaks to the goal smoothness... You cant do this in the gui as that only seems to affect individual particles and its a PITA to do it to them all by hand. I think there is a script for this on Highend3d.

Once you have your goals right, the particles should try to return to their normal position and are still affected by forces and collisions, and its not dependent on the geometry being spherical :)

Tony

[Kabab]

Dunno how relavent this is to you but it looks pretty cool.

Try using a fluid field with a motion field connected to your particles.. You can get great fluid motion of your fur would work a treat for underwater stuff..

[DSedov]

Maya Fur doesn worth the time.

For 249 you can buy a license of Haircut. Plus the rendernodes arent that expencive either. 1 Licence for actual plugin and 6 render licenses was $600.

[anthonyevans847]

I agree that Shave is a better hair system, but its also designed for a very different purpose.

Maya fur is not suitable for very dynamic hair or very long hair, but thats not what its designed for... I regularly use both, for very different things.

Shave may generate great looking hair, and have a very flexible interface for tweaking the hairstyle, but try getting it to generate 10 million strands of hair, e.g. for a large field of grass or instanced forest... or even try get the shaveDumpRib program to feed a renderer more than about 2 million hairs, its unlikely at best!

Whereas Maya fur will gladly generate some gently swaying grass, about 100000 strands a minute on my workstation, and renders beautifully even under renderman. Shave doesnt support true raytracing without generating geometry for each strand or even 3D motionblur, while Maya fur will happy emit procedural geometry to any renderer capable of accepting it :)

So, while I agree that in this case Shave is a better solution than Maya fur, that isnt always the case. The comparison isnt quite "apples and oranges" since there is considerable overlap, they are very different solutions.

Tony

[colintheys]

Hey everyone,

Thanks for all the input. I'm rendering a test using the radial field now that seems to be coming along alright (been going since I suggested it this morning and its only 100 frames at 320x240. eep) SHould have turned off some features for test purposes.

Unfortunately, shave is definately out of the question. I'm on a budget that is "tight to none." I'm using the school's copy of maya, so that's already paid for, but there can be no additional plugins, unfortunately.

I'll try looking for that script, as I am afeared to touch MEL at this early point in my Maya experience. I'll give that a shot once this render finishes and my computer is usable again. (no network render either).

I'm normally a Realsoft 3d user, so all of this non-integrated solution stuff is really sort of an alien and aggravating concept to me. The new version of Real does hair, but it's primarily for stills and probably won't include a dynamics calculator, which is too bad. :( In real, everything renders in a single renderer, which is refreshingly un-complicated. As the program uses a very powerful non-tesselated render, it can render nurbs curves directly as geometry, including using the hairs in GI calculations, etc.. I'm only using maya for this because rs won't do dynamics. I keep on finding things in Maya like hairs not rendering through transparencies that just seem to be arbitrary and occuring at a level that should not have to come to the attention of the user unless specifically requested, especially not for a multi-thousand dollar package. Oh well.

The fluids thing sounds like it could be really cool, but perhaps a little too complex for the task at hand? Needlessly time-consuming? I don't know, I shall give it a try anyway. :)

I may also have overdone the number of hairs in the scene.... It just kept looking better and better the more I added.... 100,000 hairs is probably too many for one sphere in hindsight. whoops!

EDIT
Alright, so I finished the first anim: http://condor.wesleyan.edu/ctheys/hairtest1.avi

It looks *alright*. This was done using a radial field and an 8x8 grid of attractors. There was also gravity, turbulence, and a wind field, but the wind and turbulance were basically too small to notice in the end. They looked good in the feedback previews. :/ Oh well. If I do this for real, I guess I'll have to manually place the attractors, seeing as they concentrate towards the top and I want them spread over surface area evenly. If I were doing this in Real, I'd just use an analytic and not worry about this sort of thig... can't have your cake and eat it too!

[Kabab]

If you look in the help there is a work around to get fur working through transparent objects...

[colintheys]

Hi,

Alright, I finished my next test (rendered much more efficiently this time). I changed the goal smothness to 1 and conserve to .95 and it seemed to work quite well!
http://condor.wesleyan.edu/ctheys/hairtest2.avi

btw, I did't have to find a script to do this. Perhaps I'm missing something in your meaning? I used the attribute spreadsheet to change all the values at once.

Unfortunately, this still doesn't look as good as I had hoped, although it's improving rapidly.

For this I also created a non-uniform attractor grid to more evenly control the hair. It's 8 rows high by between and 12 wide, so that it looks like this: 4, 6, 8, 12, 12, 8, 6, 4. That was a "PITA" to set up, but worth it, as it saved a LOT of time and avoided concentrating most of the processing time in one small area, namely the pole.

Any comments / suggestions are welcome! I'm leaving college for home today, so I won't be able to do another render for a little while, although I think I'll try the fluids next. mau ahhaa.

Thanks,
-Colin Theys

PS. I know there's a workaround, it would really suck if there wasn't. :) It's just costing a lot of time to stumble into each of these little quirks and have to get around them. There should just be a checkbox (on by default) to automatically seamlessly integrate the fur, rendering layers as needed and compositing. Just my 2 cents, well maybe 1 because I'm a poor student! :hmm:

[anthonyevans847]

To save time setting up attractors, you can always use geometry without poles. There are scripts/plugins to generate polygon geometry without poles in the maya bonus tools. Also, you can just create a Subdiv sphere and convert it to polys to get a sphere without poles ;)

Tony

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