Hi Tim,
I've just been dealing with hair an a hamster and used the built-in
hair&fur of Softimage /2014SP2).
A few tips about working with built-in hair:
Avoid too dense meshes. It creates a guide hair for every vertex, hence
dense meshes make you fiddle with lots and lots of guide hair strands
manually, which can be counter-productive and -intuitive.
If you want to edit hair parameters on a per vertex basis (via vertex
colors), you need to plan ahead where exactly you want your hair to be and
where you want certain features (transparency, density, kink & frizz) to
change and over which distance/area. This is especially important for
areas like hand and feet, as well as nose & eye lids.
So, before you move the mesh into skinning/rigging, you better make sure
your topology works not only for animation but also for the hair setup you
have in mind.
Don't rely on the built-in style transfer functionality. It does mostly
work but has a tendency to "blur" the transferred hair style, even if your
source and target emitter topology are the same. You need to move in again
and reintroduce details in the fur that got lost.
If you want to simulate hair with collision don't use a subd mesh as the
emitter. The docs say that having hair emitted from a subd mesh cannot
collide with its own emitter, so you have to duplicate the source mesh and
subdivide it for real (that is, create more actual polygons) and use that
as the collision object. That would still be acceptable, if it worked,
which it does not. What I found after tedious testing was that any
collision testing fails when your emitter is a subd mesh, independent of
what you have it collide with (itself or another mesh), which kinda sucks
and is the biggest problem I ran into for which I could not find a
solution. Thankfully my fur was rather short and the character had a lot
of secondary motion, so it looks alife enough (besides some problems when
bending arms, which are hardly noticeable in the animation in my case).
From what I can tell it looks like collision is always computed against a
simplified collision sphere representation of the collision object, no
matter what you set for collision accuracy and shape, deforming shape,
etc. It just doesn't work, at least not for me.
Sometimes, when saving and reloading a scene some hair strands (like 1 out
of 1000) would suddenly stick in some random direction. I had the
impression that it helps to always collapse the modeling stack before
saving, at least it never occurred again in final stages of production
when the fur description was final and not changed anymore.
Next time I will surely look at Kristinka or Melena. AS for simulation...I
believe there was a Strand Simulation framework with self collision
introduced on softimage.tv some weeks ago that looked promising, I haven't
heard of ne1 using it for hair so far, mayb someone else can comment on
that? Would love to hear some ideas on this as well.
Good luck,
Stefan
> Hi guys,
what would be a convenient way to create,style and control hair
in Softimage, with lengths up to 10-12 inches and ideally
both a good collision model and dedicated styling tools?
Which Softimage version would you suggest, e.g. 2014sp2?
I´m a novice with hair and fur but would like to set up
a manageable sample/test that ideally works with Arnold
and Redshift.
Is it possible to work generic or transfer results from,
say Yeti into Softimage?
Would you recommend actually leaning towards Maya for such
a task, either going directly to Yeti or similar?
I know those are fuzzy questions, I guess I´m actually looking
for a biased answer regarding any of the various hair plugin options
for any of the major three apps, e.g. max/maya/softimage.
Sofar, I´ve found the following options:
hairfarm, yeti, ornatrix, shave&haircut, maya hair, maya xgen "hair" in
2014ext
and the cinema4d hair options (shadowmapped).
Admittedly, that´s a lot of options and I find it difficult to bet
my time-investment onto any of them since I simply know bling about
pro´s or con´s.
Cheers,
tim
--
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Stefan Kubicek
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keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at [email protected]
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