modeling hair

[woadiestyol]

Hey Shyft,

As for the textures-on-planes method, the good news is that you don't have to give up the dynamics to achieve it. If you extrude out your patches along nurbs curves and keep your history on, you can then make the curves dynamic (I believe it's an option under the Hair menu). What this will do is create a hair system, but without any paintfx brushes attached - so you get the dynamics of hair, but you can still paint textures for the planes however you'd like. Then you can adjust the dynamic properties of the hair system (or each follicle node), and those will drive your hair patch.

I've also been searching for some good solutions to hair, and I'm invariably told to look into Shave and a Haircut, but I'm using Maya 2009 at the moment, so I'm a bit out of luck there. So if are really looking for cool hair, it sounds like that's the place to go. But if you're more like me...

Then I recommend The Art of Rigging Volume 3 from CG Toolkit. Sounds funny from a rigging book, but they go over really good examples of hair and fur (although the old cloth section has been outdated by nCloth). Unlike the underwhelming Digital Tutors DVD I watched on the subject, they actually have some pretty good looking hair examples in the book, and show you how to achieve it. They also have images in the book that actually show you what effect each setting has on the render, which is very useful, and the great thing is that you have a book to reference with images, and an included DVD to watch the creation of the hair. Best of all, I think it's only around $30, which is about half the price of a Gnomon or DT DVD, and yet the book comes with a DVD with hours worth of great stuff. If I sound like a salesman, it's because I'm a huge fan of this whole book series, and have even had questions I've posted on CGTalk answered by the author himself (Kiran), which is pretty cool when I didn't even explicitly mention the book in my thread.

Anyhow, hope this helps!

[Shyft]

i have that book. I've already looked through it. Using the tool isn't the problem. It's getting the results i want in a fast enough time period. the hair tends to look, choppy, angular. Also i'm having trouble w/ the playback and simulation stuff. My character is high poly, somewhere around 100,000 tris unsmoothed.

I've already spent almost 7 months on this 1 character (i'm doing EVERYTHING pretty much on my own, design, model, UV, rigging, texturing, dynamics, skinning, uh... animating, eventually.)

i'm currently mostly done w/ the modeling and skeleton. I want to do the hair now, or at least build hair i can later import into the scene, before i finish the rig and skin the character. (Gotta finish the neck and do the facial blendshapes/controls)

[woadiestyol]

Ah, I gotcha. As for the choppyness, you can increase the subsections in the hair to keep it from having angles (if that's what you're referring to). As far as simulation speed, keep in mind that hair in general is not generally animated with a rig, but is rather applied after the animation has been completed onto a separate render rig.

Good luck, I'd be curious to see what you come up with!