Help with eyebrows

[Iain McFadzen]

Paint them better, the best eyebrows I have ever seen (or produced for that matter) were painted straight on the head. If you need a bit more volume for bushy eyebrows use Shag Fur, but be warned you will have to paint your shag maps very carefully to make them look realistic.

[Oren Ben-Tov]

I did The eyebrows with shag hair - painting the way they will go in black and white.
this is what I got.

By the way does anybody know where I can get good eyelashes opacity map? ( I cant seem to get a good result in photoshop painting them)

thanks

[dvornik]

Try making a dot and stretching it into a stripe. Should come out with nice edges. Then copy several times in a row.

[johnny_riptide]

Very nice, Oren Ben-Tov.

If you still have them and get a chance, could you please post the shag maps that you used?

Thanks

[Oren Ben-Tov]

Thanks dvornik for the advice :)

Thanks johnny_riptide
Here are the maps :
I used the map in the SubMat ID for the length , density, and Thickness.

[Iain McFadzen]

Couple of things

1) That's a really scruffy shag map, and it shows in the render. You'll get much better results if you take a bit more time painting it carefully. Even a gaussian blur would do it the world of good.

2) Why on earth have you used separate objects as eyebrow emitters instead of just using the head itself as the emitter? All you've done is ensure that you have to do twice as much work when it comes to setting up morphs and skinning it.

[Iain McFadzen]

In fact, here's a WIP I got bored with along with my two shag maps (density on the left, length and thickness on the right). The eyebrows themselves are a bad example since I stopped working on this before I had finished them, but the transition around the main hairline is finished and you can see it's much more natural than the sudden change in density you've got there.

The head is the emitter so I can add/ remove and edit my morph targets easily as and when I please and I don't have to worry about creating separate targets for the eyebrows and then parameter wiring them or manually matching the'r animation to that of the main head model. Also, all the hair on that head (hair, eyebrows, eyelashes and facial stubble) is a single ShagFur entry, everything is controlled with maps. With Max, simplicity is everything :)

[dvornik]

Thanks, Iain. The hair looks really nice in your example. I really like how it's integrated with his facial hair. We have a copy of shag hair in school, I gotta give it a try. The eyebrows on both examples look a bit off, I think because of the direction of hair in them.

[Oren Ben-Tov]

I will try to improve it :)


But anyway the head is the emiiter for the hair, I just used the id for the shag map, and return the eyebrows id back to the original head id. I thought it would be easier to paint that way.

nice hair Iain, how did u do the bending of the fur?( just by bending direction?)

[Iain McFadzen]

Lots and lots and lots an lots of Shag Vector helpers :). The secret of getting good results from Shag (both hair and fur) is to accept that it's going to take a long time and just put loads of work into it. As I said I never put that work into those eyebrows because I got bored with the model before it was finished, but to come back to the original question, if I was going to finish this up I would almost certainly paint the eyebrows onto the map instead of using Shag, since I've had better (and much faster) results doing it that way in the past. I might have left some low-density Shag on there to give the brows a bit of volume though.

[Adam]

hey do either of you know how to change the id back to an original skin color layout after divding the face up for the emitters and apply the hair.

[Oren Ben-Tov]

After testing the hair mask on the mesh, I moved it to another id(multysub) , and put back the original material to the eyebrow.Then use the mask id in shag window ( and not the eyebrow id)
hope that help :)

[Adam]

so that means that you have to divide the texture map for the face up into multiple sections depending on were hair is. You can't just have one texture map that lays under everything because shag makes you give areas with hair a new id? There is no way to relay out the uvw cords after all the hair is placed so that the entire mesh can have one map all connected?

[Iain McFadzen]

The material ID slots that Shag uses don't have to be assigned to the model in any way. Just texture your bald model as normal using as many material IDs as you please, then when you come to Shag the head just add as many new ID slots to the multi/sub material as required. You don't need to do anything else to the ID assignments on the model.

[Adam]

sorry for taking over this thread but if I have got this right it is possible to just apply one map (all connected) to a mesh and still have all the ids work right for the hair layout.? If this is right could you explain how. I would be very greatful

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.