Help! Hair & Physique in 3ds Max8

[Squash-n-Stretch]

I've experienced several troubles with Max hair, I think it's very unreliable. Whenever I smooth a mesh with hair on it, it goes crazy. Whenever I try to isolate the hair to a specific spot using 'update poly selection' on a model that has been heavily worked on, it dissapears. It's too unreliable. The documentation that comes with Max is a joke and I can't see online documentation being any better. Sorry to be so negative, but I think the Hair solution is Max sucks.

[Allerag]

Squash-n-Stretch, thanks for the reply. I have mixed emotions about the new hair system but I can definately understand your frustration. The documentation in the user reference does explain a lot about how the system works but the tutorials leave a bit to be desired. I've managed to obtain some very nice renders with the system though and it works relatively fast, and gave better results than what I was getting using Maya hair. If I could just get it to move with my biped I'd have no problems at all. - To address your issue with the update poly selection, how dense is your mesh and how much ram do you have? Its very ram intensive and I notice a big difference when working on it with a system with only 1 gig of ram vs. one that has 2 gigs. It will some times dissapear for a moment then come back. It can be a slow process. I found that if you toggle NURMS on and off instead of using a meshsmooth modifier it can speed your work flow. I'll be running some more tests later today and if I discover any other tricks or solve my own problem I'll definately post and update.

[Kaostick]

Hey guys, a couple of quick things.. First, ditch physique.. It isn't nearly as powerful as the skin modifier, and it hasn't been updated in quite a few years. Also, when working with hair, you can avoid problems with smoothing modifiers by selecting the polys you want to grow your hair out of, and then detaching as clone. Then you can use the new object as a hair proxy object, and you don't have to worry about your smoothing modifier changing the poly count of your character.

*Allerag Mot, I have a feeling your problem with hair is because of the physique modifier.

[Illusion-shadow]

I agree with Kaostick, why are people still using physique? Why are they still teaching it? It's old school and it is not a good tool for skinning, well, at least not anymore. The skin modifier has comes a long way since max3, learn skin, it will save you one day. Like if you skin a character already, and all of the sudden you want to add more cut in the forearm, you can do it with reskinning the character and you won't lose any skinning information. Okay, enough about physique.

Now on to hair. Hair is pretty stable if you know how to use it, and it give you a really good result, aside from the long rendering time (even with 8 nodes we have in the studio). Like Kaostick said, it is better to seperate the mesh where hair will grow from. I usually cut the mesh where the hair will grow out of, so like the hair line as one object, eyeslashes as one object, and the eyebrows as one object. Then you can start to modify the hair seperately. Once you have finished modified your hair, you can add a skinwrap of the hair emitters to the orginial mesh, that way, it will move with the mesh when you animate.

Here is a few tips with working with hair:

After you finish modeling your hair, it is always good to create a copy of the spline from the hair, so if something happen, you can still do a recomb from spline. Just extract it from the modifier.

Use map to help you, I have seen people trying to model the best hair with the style tool. I really think the style tool is crap, it is not very user friendly. I tend to start from the style tool, then extract the spline and then use a script to optimize the spline and adjust each spline to get it the way I want the hair to look.

Make sure your emitter have enough polygon, if you are creating a pretty detail hair, you want to have a good number of vertices on your emitter to emitt the hair.

I have the hair on a seperate file, you don't really need it until you render. Keep your file size small and it will keep your file from crushing. I only merge it it when I am doing the final render. If you are using biped, you can always turn on figure mode and have the mesh back to the orginial position and then do a skinwrap on the hair emitter.

I hope this will help!:shrug:

[Allerag]

I got the chance to revisit the file and magically the problem no longer occurred, it was a “max moment” I suppose. I should have attempted to get out of max and then reopen when this initially happened, or clear the memory using maxscript but I didn’t think of it at the time and had to stop working for the day.



I ran some more tests. Though physique did not seem to cause any direct problems, I was wrong when I advised Squash-n-Stretch earlier that toggling nurms would save your selection set. Any change to the poly count, using nurms, mesh smooth, or turbo smooth caused the deletion of the selection set so Illusion-Shadow’s suggestion of keeping a separate mesh for the hair system is definitely a good solution- thanks for that.



Illusion-Shadow, may I ask what’s the script you use to optimize the spline?



Kaostick, you said “First, ditch physique”. I’m glad you made this suggestion as I was thinking of creating another thread regarding the topic of physique. Normally I use the skin modifier and a custom built rig. I wanted to work with biped and also use physique since I had never used it before. I thought perhaps there was some advantage to it but so far I like the skin modifier better. I prefer the joint angle deformers used with skin over the bulge and tendon with physique. They seem to lack the precise control that the skin modifier gives. I thought perhaps it might have just been my lack of experience with it but now that you said it it appears that it isn't just me. So I’m guessing that I wasn’t missing out on anything and there is no advantage to physique. Its confusing to have both physique and skin modifiers with no reference that compares the advantages or disadvantages of one vs. the other directly. This is good to know, especially for some one who may be new and deciding which one to use.

[PEN]

I know that it has been discussed at AD to drop Physique all together but they can't really do that. There are still many people using it and any legacy files that people want to work with would not work. I do wish they would add something to the help that Physique has not been updated in years and will not be updated and that Skin is the prefered tool. This gives people the option to use what they want but with the understanding that they are using a tool that will not see updates.

If you are interested in learning more about the process of learning Skin my 3rd DVD covers this in great detail.

[Illusion-shadow]

there is a script call optimized spline at maxplugins.de, and here is the direct download.


http://www.maxplugins.de/r6_files/dieter/OptimizeSpline_v1.0Max6.zip

[Allerag]

Thanks for the script Illusion-shadow. I've got another model to work on for this project and this character is a female with long hair so I know that this will be very helpful. I'm going to start skinning her today.

PEN, thanks man. I figured thats probably the only reason they keep it, for backwards compatibility. Hopefully soon I'll have a little extra cash to pick up one of your dvd's. Some of the rigging material I've been reading lately is Maya specific and though the concepts can translate into Max, or any 3d program, it would be nice to see some material done directly in Max. I've had the pleasure of reading a few of your posts in the forums and you are a wealth of information.

I spent several months last year working on a complex rig that I never successfuly skinned. I had a lot of trouble mirroring envelopes from one side to the other and eventually I had to move to other projects because i was in school at the time. I want to revisit this rig and get it up and running. I've learned a few new tricks but definately have a lot more to learn thats why these forums RULE! All of this knowledge just floating around in here! I'm relatively new to this arena I hope to join the industry soon, beyond just freelancing - so you all are greatly appreciated!

[Squash-n-Stretch]

Having the hair on a seperate piece of geometry is fine for a still, but I need to add hair to a wolf model that I'm going to be animating...is there any solution to fixing the problem I have with the hair dissapearing completely when I add a smooth?

[Allerag]

Squash-n-Stretch - sorry bud I haven't check this thread in a few days. Let me ask, is the whole wolf covered with hair/fur? I'll assume so cause, well, its a wolf and wolves are furry. If this is the case I would suggest perhaps working with a low poly hairless mesh for the animation process. Once you perfect your animation copy and past it to the high poly duplicate, or you could even have both meshes skinned to the same rig and hide the one while animating then destroy the low poly rig when you are ready to render. Also I found this in the user reference "you can copy/paste a Hair and Fur modifier from one stack to another, but it depends on a few things to do this properly. You need to line up the objects as closely as possible, since Hair uses proximity to determine how to position copied guides. If the objects are significantly different, the transfer of guides could be inaccurate. " So you could duplicate your complete wolf mesh object, turn off the meshsmooth modifier (or toggle nurms) skin it to the rig, animate to your liking than copy the hair modifier from the original and paste it to rigged mesh. OR use the Skin Wrap, again animating the low poly mesh and then use skin wrap on the high poly when you are done your animation - Lets see, how else... I'm sure there are probably a few other ways too, but the bottom line is animate using low poly and when you're all done render the high poly

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