Hair Guides Are Here!

#1

I just posted this on the list:

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Hey all,

I spoke with Ken Baer tonight (in person at a local college, nice to meet you, Ken!) and he asked if I had tried the new guide hairs in alpha 7. I said, “Huh?!” I didn’t read or hear about them. But they are in there.

Here’s a quick rundown on how to do it.

Create a spline and create a hair material. Open the spline folder under the model triangle in the PWS. Drag the material to the spline# in the PWS. Voila! A hair guide info expandable thingy appears with the shortcut to the material assigned to it. If you select the hair guide info in the PWS controls will appear on the hair guide in the modeling window. There is a circular ring around each cp in the spline (that you made into a hair guide) with control “knobs” on the ring to shape, scale and rotate the hair in that area.

If you add splines to your model to become hair guides, there will be way too many splines in the splines folder to know which one is the right spline. So select a cp on the spline in the modeling window and right/control click on the cp and select “show cp”. The cp in the splines folder will become selected and show you which spline you should drag the material to.

I’ve only played around with it briefly and I’m putting up some crude tests to show how it works. Go to:

http://homepage.mac.com/talbotj/hairguides/hair.html

This is tres cool!

Jim Talbot

#2

Yeah, they are pretty neat. Nice to see Hash working on this. :thumbsup:

#3

Man, this is why I hate being poor. :slight_smile: Next time I get the cash I think I might just upgrade instead of getting the new pc right away.

#4

hi everyone
I just tried to do my first tutorial. It’s for newbies, so for older users it isn’t really interesting. It isn’t finished at the moment, but I hope I can help some of you with it
cheers

Link

#5

Nice, simple, and very explanatory tutorial.

#6

Anyone else thinking that it would be nice to have the hairs in a bunch vary in length so as to make them look more natural? I have suggested this to Hash and was wondering what other people thought.

#7

What do you mean by “in a bunch”?

#8

I mean all the hairs that are controlled by a particular spline. At the moment you assign the hair generator to a spline and all the hairs follow it allong, but they all stop at the same time. You end up with a perfectly neatly cropped poney tale shape. Of course it is possible to vary the length of the spline guides. But I would like to have the length of the hairs controlled by the same guide vary.

Hope that wasn’t more long-winded than clear.

#9

Yeah, I know what you are getting at.:slight_smile:
When you narrow the hair strand with those circular controls, the tapered end becomes very dense looking because all you are doing is bunching it up into a smaller space when in reality, the hair tapers to a tip because it’s also made up of various lengths of hair. This would make an excellent additional control for the hair guides.

#10

Yes, that would be a great idea. I thought that was what you meant, but I thought I should get clarification just in case.

#11

Glad we cleared that one up! I was starting to get to that “maybe I should draw a diagram” stage. Words are not my strong point.

#12

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