Tutorial on braiding hair ?

#1

Hello. I seem to remember a tutorial somewhere on creating braided hair in A:M .
If I remember correctly, the tutorial showed a rotate manipulator in use.
Does anyone remember where it is located ?

Also, is it possible to ‘grab’ a group of guide hair CPs and modify them like this?* I haven’t had any luck at it.
( I am looking for a way to create curls using the hair in version 11. )

Thanks -must be off to work now. Real life calls.

  • ( Without using the brush tool that is . )
#2

First you need enough points on the guide hair to bend it quite a few times. Also, you’ll want to set the hair so that it sticks almost exactly to the guide rather than let gravity and dynamics determine its place.

Next you need to be in grooming mode.

A trick I saw on the tech talk video that will help you is to go into your options and reset the grooming toolbar. They have added an ‘FK’ control that will allow you to manipulate the guides in an FK fashion rather than the default IK (which is too unpredictable for my taste and for what you’re asking about).

We cool?

#3

Thanks pdaley.

( As far as bending individual hairs, my model probably has thousands of hairs, so this sure makes it a labor intensive process vs. just selecting groups of hairs and twisting them.)

So is there a way to actually use the rotate/scale/move manipulator on hair ?

Does anyone recognize the tutorial that I am talking about ?

BTW : A really nice feature to have in Hash hair would be a ‘curl’ feature.

Thanks.

#4

It seems to me that the best way to do a braid would be to use the v10 hair locks, which are just splines that you can use any standard tool on. Then when you build the braid pattern of splines, you add the hair to the splines. To create a v10 hair lock material, you have to hold down the shift key when changing the material type to particle/hair.

Jim

#5

Thanks Jim. Forgive my ignorance here, but I currently do not have V10 installed, but do have 10.5.
Does V10.5 have this feature as well ? ( I notice that the hair system was indeed different ( and it had a clumpiness feature too ).

I’m puzzled by what you mean by a ‘hair lock material’

BTW : Actually I’m not interested in creating braids for my character, but was rather looking for an alternate means of curling the hair vs. curling the hairs one by one.

Thanks again.

#6

Sorry, I wasn’t very clear in my message.

In v11 you can still create the hair material that you could make in v10 and v10.5 (they have the same hair feature). I called it the v10 hair locks, because some of the hash guys refer to them by that name. I didn’t mean you needed to have v10 available.

Try creating a spline and curling it how you want the hair to grow. Copy that spline and paste it as many times as you need and scatter them over the area of the head where you want them. Create a new material, expand the triangle next to the name and while holding down the shift key, change the attribute to particle system/hair. You will create a hair emitter, which is the v10 v10.5 kind of hair. Next select a cp on one of the spline that you want to make a hair guide/lock, and right click on it and choose select cp. The splines folder under the name of the model in the PWS will expand and show the number of the cp you selected. Drag the hair material you made onto the spline that contains the selected cp. Make sure you have “show particles” turned on. (Hit shift-8 if they aren’t on.) You should see the hair follow the shape of the spline. You should also see a hair lock property nested under the spline in the spline folder in the PWS. Select that and you can edit the hair thickness and twist the hair or untwist it. I’ve attached a shot of what you might try to create this way.

I hope this is kind of clear.

Jim

#7

Jim, thank you so much for your help with this.

I have taught myself what little that I now know in A:M through years of constant failures.
If I just had the sense years ago to just ASK you guys, I would know so much more than I now know.:banghead:

Thanks again for your time and for going the extra ‘mile’ to explain how to create hair locks in such great detail.

Other ‘newbies’ much like myself will appreciate this information as well.

EDIT POST : Jim …Jim jim jim …wow .I just tried your technique. What can I say man ? Why was this method for creating hair ever changed in the first place ? The older version is far superior in my opinion.
I owe you big time on this one buddy.

#8

Just try covering a gorilla with the old method. :smiley:
Also, the new method allows for images (to do feathers) etc.

Sincerely,

Carl Raillard

#9

I see your point about the gorilla example !

I think I may have gotten the wrong impression in my haste at testing the older version of hair.
I assumed that you could apply decals to the hair. I remember seeing a ‘tutorial’ page of hair controlled by various decals : Color, Length, Direction, Diffuse color…or whatever.
This image ‘tutorial’ must be have been referring to the new hair features.

Crap ! . I was really looking forward to using it this weekend with some decals. :sad:

#10

I am almost positive that you can use decals to control hair in 10.5. What Carl is saying is that now you can use an image for the hair itself. For example, I made a bonsai tree recently and made the hair look like little juniper twigs. Colin Freeman has a tutorial on hair maps that may be helpful. It may be for version 11 but should still be useful.

http://www.colins-loft.net/hairbrush.html

#11

Here are a couple official pages about the v10 hair (2003) and the v11 hair (2004).

http://www.hash.com/am2003/Locks%20of%20Hair/index.htm

http://www.hash.com/am2004/Modeling/Hair/index.htm

The 2004 link shows how decals can still affect the hair particle.

Jim

#12

I’m experimenting with both the new and old style hair, and was wondering what I am doing wrong.
I’m trying to get the ( new style ) hair stiffer.
Even when I set the hairs stiffness at 100 %, the hair still reacts the same when I comb it - ( like a limp noodle that just flops over. )

Also, when I turn on collision detection, how do I tell A:M that I want my models scalp to act as a collision object ?

( Is that info. in one of the videos ? )

One last question : If I use a hybrid technique of using both types of hair together, will this cause any problems if I ever try to animate the model ?
Thanks

#13

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