Rman/MTOR hair from maya

[vapulus]

oh come on, guys...SOMEBODY has to render hair in renderman =D

[TimusT3]

I can't really help you with your question, but I thought I'd reply to your post to give you and inflated sense of self-esteem.

OMG_pbKannan

[tomb]

You could render out a PFX pass in Maya and comp it onto your Renderman rendered scene. I find PFX really hard to control for hair, the dynamics dont seem to work right :annoyed: .

One way of using PFX for hair that I saw a production company demonstrating is:
- Use nurbs cylinders and turn them into cloth objects
- create a curve in the centre
- wrap-deform curve to the cylinder
- make the cylinder invisble
- add a hair PFX brush to the curve
- Dupicate this dredlock over the whole head
- pin constrain the cloth objects to the creature's head. Viola!

Otherwise Joe Alter sound like a good alternative to me.

[vapulus]

Originally posted by tomb
You could render out a PFX pass in Maya and comp it onto your Renderman rendered scene. I find PFX really hard to control for hair, the dynamics dont seem to work right :annoyed: .

One way of using PFX for hair that I saw a production company demonstrating is:
- Use nurbs cylinders and turn them into cloth objects
- create a curve in the centre
- wrap-deform curve to the cylinder
- make the cylinder invisble
- add a hair PFX brush to the curve
- Dupicate this dredlock over the whole head
- pin constrain the cloth objects to the creature's head. Viola!

Otherwise Joe Alter sound like a good alternative to me.

Like I said, I can use pfx for hair, that's not the question. The issue is that i'm trying to NOT have to render the hair in maya. I'm trying to find a good way of rendering hair IN renderman. Pfx is not useable in rman. So, what other methods of creating hair can work with rman, OR what can i use to maybe trick renderman into rendering the pfx objects...or convert the pfx to something renderman doesn't hate.

[Flinch]

you can render maya-hair with mtor's ultrafur. sorry that i can't you a step-by-step solution for this but as far as i remember it's documented in the rat-docs. maybe there's someone here who can help you more. (like mauritius, cgtalk's rman-freak :beer: )

--Flinch

[vapulus]

Originally posted by Flinch
you can render maya-hair with mtor's ultrafur. sorry that i can't you a step-by-step solution for this but as far as i remember it's documented in the rat-docs. maybe there's someone here who can help you more. (like mauritius, cgtalk's rman-freak :beer: )

--Flinch

actually, i heard about using ultraFur. Am I right in thinking that it only works with maya fur, though? I can use maya fur, but I was under the impression it doesn't give convincing results as long hair.

[vapulus]

Yes, I'm bumping my own thread in the hopes someone can help. :D

[Taos]

Wow, first time I come to this website, and I find something completely in line with what I do.

For the last few months (unemployment), I have passed my time making my own hair animation plugin for maya, with the intention of exporting to RenderMan. If you're a linux user, check it out here: http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~rtp9709/projects/hair/hair.html

I'd love to have someone test it out for me and offer suggestions. So far I'm basing it on what I want in there, but you may have another opinion.

To answer your questions, yes, RiCurves is how you render hair according to the RM standard, how you get it to those curves is another matter. I'm currently hacking Colin Dancaster's Liquid to export my hair with the scene. Ahh, the joys of open source.

I've seen many tutorials for using Paint Effects, and of course, there is Joe Alter's S&H as suggested. Never used S&H in maya, and it was released after I started this little project, and the Paint Effects methods annoyed me to no end. Maya Fur just doesn't cut it for long hair.

[vapulus]

Originally posted by Taos
Wow, first time I come to this website, and I find something completely in line with what I do.

For the last few months (unemployment), I have passed my time making my own hair animation plugin for maya, with the intention of exporting to RenderMan. If you're a linux user, check it out here: http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~rtp9709/projects/hair/hair.html

...

Well, i checked out your project and I'm pretty impressed with what you've accomplished. I don't use linux, however, so I don't really have any way to test it out. It looks like you're well on your way to an impressive hair system...especially for a "non-commercial" system. I don't suppose there's any hope of you building an NT version, eh? =) Thanks a lot for the information, though. At least I see some hope. =)

P.S. I do have MacOS X and Windows XP (both with standard compilers) if you ever get to a version that could be tested by a non-programmer. =)

[Taos]

Well, if you have Visual C++ for Windows or CodeWarrior for OSX, I'd love to talk you through it. It really involves nothing more than setting up the project and compiling.

Long ago, when I first started the precursor to this project, I was working in Visual C++, so I know it can be easily ported (the dual threaded method I recently added might be a problem now that I think about it. Moreso on Windows than OSX).

Actually, I am VERY interested in someone porting this to OSX for me. A professor at my old University would like to use it, but I don't have access to the tools neccassary.

[vapulus]

Yep, I've got visual C++ and maya 4.0 for windows. I have access to codewarrior and maya 3.5 for osX, as well. Most of the things I've coded are web-based, so the majority of my platform code has been coding console programs on windows. My CS-major friend said he'd compile on osX and send you back an error log if it didn't go smoothly.

[Taos]

I sent you a message through icq. Email me privately and we'll work this out.

[1YAG]

windows xp version!!!! :wip:

please ^_^....

[Taos]

please note (before anybody gets too excited)

This does NOT render anything yet. It's workable within Maya, but when you click on render, it doesn't do anything.

That said, now that I've finally found an audience, I'm a little more motivated to get the rendering code done :)

[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.