Hi John, thanks for the workflow tip.
I went through the GoZ and Export Curves options of ZBrush Fibermeshes yesterday, then either exporting the GoZ (polystrips) result from Maya to Softimage (as *.obj) or assigning an exisiting nhair system to the ZBrush curves imported into Maya as *.ma. I didn´t have time to fully get to understand the nhair system, just went with Pfx strokes on curves. Set to dynamic, I managed to choke my setup with ca. 10 000 curves and 10 hair strands per curve. I would think I´ll need around 250 000 hairs rendered but might be able to optimize the amount of control curves to a more responsive amount. Maybe I just created too many dependencies from the imported curves to the hairfollicles to the pfx strokes in the hair system. The results I produced looked like crap, for a number of reasons. Not worth posting a sample, yet. What are you using inside Softimage to render the nhair? Strands? Do you go with mR or rely on a renderman/arnold renderer? VRay? I am biased towards hoping to render the (follicle) hair curves directly, as that would give identical results in both Softimage and Maya, e.g. the same curves, the same distribution and might minimize overheads. Cheers, tim On 10.02.2014 20:51, John Richard Sanchez wrote:
Maya nhair has been pretty good for me especially with collisions. I usually animate in xsi and send cached animation and camera to Maya to render a hair pass. On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 4:25 AM, Tim Leydecker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Thanks Mario, you´re right, once I realized I could use masked areas and morphtargets it was a lot easier to control the hair grooming in zbrush. I haven´t managed to put together a simple sample moustache kind of file to test the import into Maya/Softimage and dynamics, yet. That´ll have to wait until at least next weekend before I can put everything together. Thanks again for pointing at ZBrush/fibermesh, I would have discarded this option to early. Cheers, tim On 09.02.2014 12:40, Mario Reitbauer wrote: You have to play around with the brushes, as soon as you are familar with what burshes you can use it's quite nice. Just to mention: groom length, move, smooth are some you definitly need (shorten and smooth them with smooth brush then move them in position with lengthen or smooth brush). 2014-02-09 11:44 GMT+01:00 Tim Leydecker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>>: Hey Mario, how do you go about Fibremeshing, I tried it but found it difficult to get to a point that looked nice. I´ll have another look into some of the tutorials today. I guess I may have missed a part of the workflow. Regarding hair-farm, the manual states the option to export the hairdo as curves or polygonstrips or polygontubes, it seems there is less hard conversion work involved as what Lee-Perry Smith posted in his 2012ish examples. Cheers, tim On 08.02.2014 18:17, Mario Reitbauer wrote: I can highly recommend doing the basic hair styling in Zbrush with fibremesh and then export it to maya directly or through a plugin (http://florianeberle.com/____2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-____strands <http://florianeberle.com/__2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-__strands> <http://florianeberle.com/__2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-__strands <http://florianeberle.com/2012/02/21/fibermesh-to-strands>>) to softimage. You can then use the imported curves for ice or in yeti to finalize your hair grooming. Actually there is no tool which is even close to zbrush when it comes to brushing your hair. I guess this will be the way to go in the future (at least for brushing your guides before you add stuff on top) cheers Mario On Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:12:33 +0000, "Artur Woźniak" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: Guys I worked with in Platige, used ass to export hair from yeti. Textures were applied then in Xsi. Artur ------ Wiadomość oryginalna ------ Od: "olivier jeannel" Do: Wysłano: 2014-02-08 16:08:26 Temat: Re: Softimage Hair options? How do you export a hair sim from Yeti back in Softimage ? Pointcache ? Alembic ? Ass ? Do all info translate well for rendering in Arnold ? Olivier Le 08/02/2014 15:21, Sebastien Sterling a écrit : Maybe if we got a petition of xsi centric companies or a sort of kickstarter goal we could persuade them that Softimage is worth porting too :) i know i'd drop a grand for yeti. On 8 February 2014 15:07, Sebastien Sterling wrote: Having seen people use Yeti for a year in production i'd have to say its pretty revolutionary in terms of workflow, i've seen people acclimatise to it in a matter of weeks, the only drawback i can see is ironically, it doesn't render using mental ray, obliging you to go for Arnold or vray renderman... A year ago, i sent them an email inquiering as to the possibility of a Softimage port in the near/far future. this was the response. "Thank you for the great feedback - we have investigated Yeti integration for rendering preview which may be available in a later version but at this time we're not planning an XSI version of the editing tools. Adding in support for a whole new 3D application is a large task and we haven't had enough demand for an XSI version at this stage. If at some point that changes and it looks like a studio may commit to a large number of licenses we could afford to do this. We're glad you're enjoying Yeti! All the best, Colin" On 8 February 2014 13:25, Tim Leydecker wrote: Thanks for this in-depth answer! Personally, I´m starting to lean towards going for the trial of Yeti, one reason being that I think I remember Colin Doncaster´s name from another maya maling list and another because of the really nice sample image of a bear posted by Yolandi Meiring in a similar thread here: (Thread) (Image) Another really nice one is a proof of concept of bringing (3dsMax) hair-farm into Softimage from Lee-Perry Smith, with props to Dani Garcia and Steven Caron. That human hairdo and it´s renderings look incredibly awesome. For a Melena/Kristinka workflow using Anto Matkovic´s tools in those beautiful shed projects there´s a nice clip posted by/on Lester Banks -- I have only limited amounts of time I can spend on this and need to find something that has potential to be useable for testing Redshift´s hair shading approach when applicable but ideally integrates seamlessly into either Maya/Max/Softimage. The combination of Maya+Redshift is allready working very well and it seems it´ll be easier to successfully migrate from simple hair/fur testing to something actually looking good (using yeti). Also, yeti has a variety of licensing options I might find atractive at a later date if tempted to actually finish something beyond spare-time doodling. I´d prefer Softimage but if that stuff works better in Maya, it´ll be Maya. I suck with Max, even the fastest and most intuitive plugin can´t compensate that sad fact. Cheers, tim On 08.02.2014 12:57, Stefan Kubicek wrote: 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 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 -- www.johnrichardsanchez.com <http://www.johnrichardsanchez.com>
