Realistic Hair Tutorials?

#1

Hi there,

anybody know of some good video tutorials for XSI hair and how to achieve realistic hair?

I went to digital-tutors but didn’t see anything specific for hair in XSI.

Thanks for suggestions in advance

#2

If you mean by good “free”, then well: no!
Digital Tutors sells an Introduction to XSI Hair.

#3

Oh thank you, didn’t notice that one. Although this “introduction” seems not to focus a lot on “realistic” hair though.

Has realistic hair ever really been achieved in XSI? It seems to me that most XSI-hair examples look like that render on the dt-page but i might be wrong though.

Anybody know of a hair plug-in for XSI with better results than the built in one?

#4

If you’ve seen hair in Max or Maya rendered in mr then there is no reason you couldn’t, at least for stills, achieve the same results in XSI. There is also a free, 3rd party hair shader in addition to the supplied one called MuHair that might be of help for you. I have not yet tested this in 7.x but I’m assuming it works fine still.

There are a lot of things you can do to control the base color of hair and light it that will help you get the results you want as well.

The renders on the dt page are horrible IMHO. Mainly because the hair is so uniform on all levels, and too thick (esp on the girl). Don’t forget you can never judge a render engine just by a few images- anyone can take any render engine and turn our horrible work by ignoring just a few simple rules…

Did you mean styling? That’s another factor…

#5

Hehe, yes the DT hair doesn’t look especially nice/realistic.

Even this tutorial for “Ice Age” type hair looks better IMO:
http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/3d__and__animation/how_do_i_create_ice_age-like_hairy_characters_in_xsi

That said, I do think that the developers could well have invested more in making hair more manageable/styleable. But this is how it always is - one has the paintbrush and colors and in the hands of an expert a masterpiece can be painted. But for the rest of us some presets or functions to more easily control the draping and flow of hair would have been helpful.

#6

WTF?
that horse and bird are gallery abominate material

#7

That is what you get when you hire professional instructors instead of professional artists.

#8

Realistic?

Do you mean real looking, or real moving? The hair looks real enough, it just that long dynamics don’t work properly.

#9

I’m looking rather to get it realistic looking. I don’t know what you mean but to me it doesn’t look real enough and playing with XSI for a while now and the hair i never got to anything worthwhile. But i’m sure some hair specialists out there got better results.

If you know anything let me know,
thanks!

#10

IMHO xsi hair is getting a bit long in the tooth. At the time of it’s introduction is was amazing, now not so much. For still shots it can be fine but it will take you a lot of work both to style it (as the styling tools in XSI are pretty weak - just to compare them to what you get in C4D) and the rendering will also take a lot of experimentation to get it looking good. Hair in xsi requires a lot of experimentation, it certainly is not a wash and go solution :wink:

The problems are only compounded when trying to do a moving shot with dynamics. If you are doing short hair…it’s pretty easy, however, if you are attempting to do long hair well prepare yourself for a whole world of hurt. The built in hair dynamics are weak, however, people have done all sorts of work rounds but at the end of the day… well, not ideal.

IMHO the future of hair simulation in xsi is via ICE. Softimage did demonstrate a working solution using a strand dynamics framework based on Verlet integration, which as far as I am concerned is pretty exciting. Too bad they never released or shared the compound with the community, only used it as a teaser… don’t get me started on that issue. Anyway, I suspect that in time (hopefully) these compounds will find their way into a future release, no doubt billed as the next gotta have feature. That’s fine with me, I just would like to have access to these strand dynamic compounds because with them creating CG hair becomes a whole lot more interesting. In any event, ICE will make it possible to go far beyond many of the current limitations of the current hair system, so here is hoping that the developers will provide us mere mortals with these all important compounds.

But again, you can make do with the current hair system it is capable of doing the job, however, I think ICE will be a far better solution for the future.

Cheers,

J

#11

Hair in XSI is amazing for fur and short haircuts. It gets somewhat harder to work with and style with longer hair-cuts but it is possible to use still. Animation/Dynamics is a whole other issue here as well, and I don’t have experience in animating hair.

#12

Its more than lack of art,
its a lack of understanding and/or effort that makes it not worthwhile learning material.

Why show a bird with pretty much default hair on it, no instanced feathers or shader setup or grooming etc? I’m stunned this is out here as tutorial material and even more stunned there’s a cost for it.

If you’re learning XSI hair, this is not good material to be looking at.

#13

Well I hope Softimage/ Autodesk will tweak on the hair section in XSI instead of telling people to possibly utilize ICE for hair in future.

#14

Why?

Given that ICE will be/is clearly a superior method of hair creation I don’t really see why it would be a good idea for Autodesk to put much effort into what amounts to a current toolset with clearly limited possibilities.

In my view, ICE hair is the way forward.

Regards,

J

#15

Funny, I hope they’ll keep working on ice so that the hair section is finally made entirely redundant :slight_smile:

#16

Just for those of you who do not already know:
on Softimage|NET “Mathaeus” has created some ICE-Compounds tackling the problem of “Icy Hair”…
SI|NET-Thread :bowdown:

#17

If you think this is bad, you should see their rigging tutorial.:rolleyes: It’s even worse than the character stuff on the videos that hips with SI7. It’s always nice to have instructors that know how to do what they are trying to teach you, but this company seems a little short on these. People seem to think that because SI ships with a DT video, they are good, which is a big disservice by SI to their user.

I just watched the ICE tutorial from i3d tutorials, and while it’s limited in what it teaches (ICE as particles for the most part) it does a VERY good job of it.

#18

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