Maya Fur & Cloth. Any good?

[stormtroopar]

This question does vary on what you are doing. For photorealistic film work, I definitely think Fur is not quite there and cloth is alright if its not something too complex.

The thing is if you just need cloth, I probably advice getting Syflex with Maya complete instead. Fur in general gets you a good start, but rendering and animation is an issue. But besides, Shave and a haircut, there aren't much other solution and shave got its own problems. Paintfx can be used for hair type stuff, but not the greatest solution either. But considering the price, Shave and maya complete is probably a reasonable choice.

[mark_wilkins]

I've seen some excellent fur work done with Jig, also.

-- Mark

[matty429]

Don't forget about fluids....And what else ever comes later.....

[Jozvex]

I'm pretty sure they just used regular Maya Fur and Maya Cloth on the original Stuart Little movie, and that was good.

It was only Maya 3 too.

[stormtroopar]

I do remember the original Stuart Little using Cloth, and they wrote proprietary tools to plug it into their pipeline. But I am pretty sure it was Not maya fur. It was proprietary tools. Also, it was rendered with PRman. Maya fur alone could never be able to render fur with the same quality as whats in stuart little 1. Antialiasing problems being just one of the major issues.

[Carina]

Did not AW advertise fur and cloth referring to Stuart Little?

[matty429]

Storm trooper is right on the money....But I believe they did use Maya dynamics and control curves for Sony's In house fur renderer..

[Goob]

I think cloth is a pretty cool tool. fur isn't! it's nice for stills, but in animations there are often errors in some frames. there are also often errors in the z-buffer (very important for the compositing of the fur images). so you got to calculate much time to fix this in the post. it's very important, to understand how this tools are working, otherwise in a production they will be a nightmare.


goob.

[danyrey]

True.
We tried to use Fur for our project at school and there was no day without any problems. No SubD support, special requirenments for the UV Map, furrender stops halfway through a batchrender and produces naked characters and so on...........

If you know all bugs and workarounds, go for it, else expect alot of try and failure and lots of research.

We faked all with textures, in the end :wip:

I can understand now why every Productionhouse using Maya, do their own Furpipeline

[Rudity]

I love maya cloth and Dynamics.

I needed to have a soccer corner flag pole bend when the soccer ball hit it.
So I used cloth for the flag and in about 30 minutes I had the simulation I wanted which looked super cool.
Not to mention I had never used it before.. Its pretty easy to use for what i used it for.
Though I havn't tried to drape a shirt over a character yet.
My opinion might change after that..
But anyways..

So thats my opinion on cloth..
Fur.... never used it..

So if this doesn't help with your decision no prob.
But I hope it does.

Later Rudity

[thesaint]

Fur is difficult to get right in any package, but Maya is one of the best for sure.

To be honest a lot of detail in fur has to do with the renderer. Maya's own render engine is not very good and so it tends to let it's own Fur down.

To see just how well Maya can do take a look at Stuart Little. A friend of mine out at Image Works tells me that was done with an out-of-the-box copy of Maya 3 unlimited.
Rendered using PRMan's ultraFur plug-in.

Not sure about the cloth, but to be honest cloth and fur take a lot of tweeking to get right even with the best simultations. They are complex and intricate and most of all commonly seen by everyone, which makes people very aware of anything that doesn't look right.

One powerful thing with Maya is the ability to increase and decrease the alogrythm accuracy, so you can start off low and sort out the major issues, then slowly increase the detail -- sorting out any issues on the way

[yaz786vip]

Talking about fur. i just cant get mine to work. had to submit some naked characters for my final renders. i know this is not part of the forum but there seems to be a few "know its" here!:D

[3rd Dimentia]

SPI wrote their own fur for Stuart little and there was an immense use of MEL and even a little bit of Houdini when they did the cloth. They had to do many passes on the cloth simulations and blend these together. Even this wasn't enough and that's why they had to use houdini to do "fixups" SPI even helped A/W to develop the cloth that is in maya these days since the cloth stuff was pretty early at that point.

[Whirlwind]

My personal opinion is to go for Complete and then get plugins later as you need them. Such as the already mentioned Syflex. While Maya cloth is easy to learn and use; so is Syflex from my understanding. I would do some number crunching and decide which is the cheaper of the two.
As far as fur goes, you've heard the complaints and I'm sure dozens more that aren't even listed. Without a hardcore programer/mel scripter on your side, your not going to get much out of fur.
Just my two cents.
-D

[Matt Leishman]

I would have to agree with thesaint. I haven't had overly extensive exposure to using fur in maya, but I've had enough to know that with some patience, and a good understanding of how to properly edit your fur descriptions (with no mel) you can get some pretty terrific results. My 2 cents at least.

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