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Geuse
10-23-2006, 10:38 PM
Aight, as the title implies. I have done some tests and I'm looking for some answers/tips/suggestions.

To begin with I'm using maya 7.

I start off by explaining what I want.
I want to do hair for a female character. Combed back in a pony tail and then a hair strand from her bangs to curl down. the pony tail and the bang is supposed to be dynamic. The hair on her head is not supposed to move.

I already did a character with fur and mayas hair dynamics so I want this to be in the same style. So I'd rather stick to paintfx instead of textured polygons/nurbs patches.

Think "The Incredibles"

I started doing curves for hairflow and then paintfx them, but I don't want it to be dynamic. Is there any way you can do this? I know you can use the start curve attract feature and set it to 100, but then It still is solving. Sure It could look cool with some slight motion, but because of computing it all, I'd rather just have it stiff as a.....yeah something.

As for the bangs and pony tail I figured I create a nurbs ring and attach paint fx to that and then have that paintfx be driven by one curve with "maya hair". Anyway I don't get the results I'm looking for here either.

Any help or suggestions or anything at all, maybe a totally different approach. I'd be happy to know!


Take care everybody!
Geuse
10-24-2006, 11:32 AM
Ok, so this is my problem.
I can't seem to get rid of the shit going on. The paint fx that is curling.

http://img1.putfile.com/thumb/10/29607283199.jpg (http://www.putfile.com/pic.php?img=3793048)

http://img1.putfile.com/thumb/10/2960728329.jpg (http://www.putfile.com/pic.php?img=3793049)
Geuse
10-24-2006, 02:36 PM
Ok, I've settled for a different approach which is to make a curve dynamic with maya hair and then there's a nice way you can just assign paintfx to that curve. Think it's going to look nice.

http://img1.putfile.com/thumb/10/29610353344.jpg (http://www.putfile.com/pic.php?img=3794215)
Savagemonkey
10-24-2006, 07:41 PM
I believe that one of the ways that you could accomplish making the curves not dynamic would be to delete the history on the curves so that they no longer connect to the hairsystem node. You could also go about deleting the hairsystem node in the hypergraph. Then all you're left with is NURBs curves and / or paintFX curves that you can work with.

I'm assuming that the type of character that you're going for is Carrie the babysitter. I just got done working on a realistic character with hair and what I would suggest in terms of what you want is to draw the curls that fall down in front of the face that you want to make dynamic, and then "Make selected curves dynamic" and output them in the same way that you would the curves from the back. If you want a lot of curves that look like they're all part of the same curl, then birail the one curve, select isoparms and duplicate the curves so that you have a bunch of curves, which could be connected to a paintFX shader, dynamically controlled by only one hair curve.

As for actually outputting/rendering the hair, I've found that the best way to do it so that it works well with shadows is to turn the hair into actual geometry or NURBS surfaces using extrude for planar surfaces or the Birail tool for hair kinda like the girl in Open Season. I'd suggest the latter if you're going for a cartoony look. It renders really niceley and you can give it a really soft look. And once you have the curves turned into acutal surfaces you could then rig them with a simple skeleton chain and even add an IK/FK switch if you wanted.
Geuse
10-25-2006, 01:00 AM
Thanks for the answers!
I created a hairsystem for a sphere. then deleted it's follicle and then the sphere so I was left with a hairsystem with it's paint fx.

I then did a bunch of curves and then assigned my hairsystem to them. Then I wanted to keep only the paint fx and my curves to go along with it and delete all the rest, but that just didn't work.

When I deleted the hairsystem the paint fx also disappeared. I tried deleting history and everything. I even peed on my computer. That didn't work either!

Then I set the hairsystem to static and then created a new curve to flow through the middle of all the paint fx. I made the curve dynamic with maya hair and used this as a wire deformer to drive the curves which the paint fx was connected to.
So I'm left with two hairsystem. One handling the paint fx and one handling the dynamics.
No problem having it like this. It's working and I'm close to satisfied besides some minor adjustment, but It would be nice to totally get rid of the first hairsystem.
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10-25-2006, 01:00 AM
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