CGTalk - Maya Hair Issues

snikt

08-28-2004, 06:15 AM

Hi,
The project I am involved with has a lot of use of Maya Hair in it.There are a few issues however which can help me in doing this better.The characters have long hair straight or curly.

1)For the hair to collide and give good acceptable results is it better to use collide constraints or the polygon mesh of the character itself(make collide option).When the character is doing any extreme action like jumping or dancing which will hold better constraint or mesh.

2)Is it possible that the friction attribute under the dynamics section of the hair system can be given a gradient value such that the root cv's of the hair curve have a higher value and the tip of the hair has a lesser friction value.This can be very useful as the hair sticking on the head will not fly off and the tips will be free and not stick to the body.

3)Under the follicle shape of the hair curve there is a color attribute under the render overrides.I understand that it can be used for giving streaks.This however works with single color.What if I have to give it a gradient from say red to blue or more colors.

I hope I am clear in putting down the issues I face.Thank you very much.

Snikt

snikt

08-30-2004, 07:54 AM

Hi,
Anyone there?

joss3D

08-30-2004, 01:23 PM

1)->The maya help say that it's better to us the collide constraint.

Duncan

08-30-2004, 09:06 PM

1. Use a collide constraint when possible instead of geometry collisions.
2. You can't make friction a gradient, but there are other ways of keeping
the base of the hairs more constrained:
-you can edit the stiffness ramp, which can partly achieve what you want when combined with rest curves
-one can use a hair transform constraint.. set the constraint pointMethod to uparameter and make the uparameter something like 0.3(near the head). Parent the constraint under the head and adjust the stiffness on the constraint to the desired amount( you may need low values like 0.02 to provide enough flex ).
-a hair to hair constraint, similarly placed( uparameter = 0.3 or so) can keep the hair stuck together near the roots
3. Color randomization on the hairSystem is applied relative to the base color, as is the hairColorScale Ramp. So if you used some saturation rand you could make your per follicle colors internally vary between the color and grey within each clump. If you need more specific variation then you could do hair->assignHairSystem->new to the follicle( this duplicates the current hairSystem and constraints on that follicle ). The color settings on the new hairSystem would only affect that follicle. Alternately you could paint in new follicles at the clump location and make the follicle clumpWidthScales lower, to replace the original clump with more and smaller clumps thus providing more follicles to define the color with.

Duncan

snikt

08-31-2004, 04:42 PM

Thanks Duncan for the tips.
Snikt

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