Hair/Fur

[Iain McFadzen]

Get ShagHair/Fur from Digimation (it's about $500 I think). It's not as good as the hair modules /plugins on other apps by a long long way, but it's the best there is until Splutterfish get around to converting Shave And A Haircut to Max.

There are a load of free scripts which are half-decent, but don't expect an easy time or woderful results with those. You'll most likely find them at www.scriptspot.com.

[GlasS-]

Hooee, that's a bit more money a stundent like me can afford. Have to make my characters bald then i guess ;)

[Gilgamesh]

If you can settle for a buzz cut then use the scatter compound object. You can make a little tiny cone and then scatter it over the person's head.

[Iain McFadzen]

Actually some of the best CG hair I have ever see was done using the opacity-mapped plane method. It doesn't work as well in Max as it does in Lightwave for example (due to the way max shadowmaps ignore material opacity), but you can still make it look as close to real as with any plugin.

Also, contact Digimation and ask them if they do student licenses. I am pretty sure they do, though I've no idea how much you would save.

[xynaria]

Not tried it myself but I have seen people get good results using this method :
http://www.comet-cartoons.com/toons/3ddocs/hair/index.html

Far better in fact than might be suggested by the tutorial images themselves. :)

[teacup]

I used the techinique on the comet-cartoons site for this, but with a cylinder, converted to edit-poly, then cut the end off, assigned a uvw map. this gives a better effect than just boxes. I also used a copy of the mesh of the back of the head scaled up a bit, with a dark brown texture so that you dont see the scalp.
This method works quite well cos you can easily put a flex modifier on the strands of hair to give it a bit of movement.

[Chris Watkins]

I believe Max will use opacity information on a shader if you use raytraced shadows, which is a setting under Shadow Parameters on the light.
It takes longer to render and you might have to do some extra fooling to get anything other than a perfectly clean shadow, like blurring your clip map, but it works.

[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.