direct download can be found here: http://www.si-community.com/download/compounds/kristinka-hair-c-29aug09.rar

Watch FLV movie

Features:

support for strand dynamics from Phil Pack
- support for strand dynamics from MT_Strands Addon
- support for Syflex dynamics, by using mesh strips, generated with MT_Strands Addon
- blending with static point cloud, so you can simulate just a part of hair
- blending (morphing) with another point cloud
- smooth subdivision of strands, after simulation
- constant strand length, without simulation, so you can do believable keyframed animation
- cutting hairs by geometry - any geometry, not just planes
- a few new deformers
- compatibility with factory nodes for deforming strands, such as bend or turbulize
- sharper curve interpolation, also Hermite (through control points) interpolation as an option

In order to work, MT_Strands addon should be installed. It's here.
Not the all compounds needs that addon, but some important compounds for resampling rely on MT_Strands_Fitting node, also setups for Syflex/SI Cloth needs ICE strands extrusion.

Now it's a bunch of Softimage's models, every of them trying to explain some of features. Instead of classic documentation, I've added a lot of comments together with models. Complete setup from previous post's movie is there too - everything except female model. So, suggested usage is to take tour through models, or just to try to adapt existing setups to your characters.

This time, hair rig always consist at least two point clouds. Main for hair guides, this one is styled or simulated. Another is a high resolution hair for rendering, which is just interpolated over guides, but also can carry the strand modifiers. From styling stuff, there is a new, 'Follow NURBS' modifier, that forces strands to follow NURBS surface. So now it's possible to do more complex styling, such as braids or tiny hair layers over character's body. It can work together with default, 'cross section' controllers.For Syflex/SI Cloth, there is only setup for transferring deformations. ICE Simulation setups should play their simulations as soon as you import XSI model and playback the scene.

NURBS surfaces are almost everywhere in this hair rig, together with slightly forgotten NURBS terminology. Reparameterize, fit, swap UVs... On the other side, no one of these setups requires weight maps or tangents maps, also controllers doesn't rely on topology anymore.

Setups were heavy tested on a few 7.01 versions, I think they should work nicely with other versions too.

At the end, a few tips that everyone knows, but anyway:
- with ICE, you can copy/paste ICE trees between different scenes. Exactly, you can open another scene, copy ICE compounds, close that scene and open new one, then paste compounds into desired ICE tree.
- you can always replace geometries, used as inputs for ICE operators
- if you need to rename models with ICE point clouds inside, do that only inside XSI scene, don't rename them in Windows explorer, don't rename them when exporting. ICE can use generic, 'This_Model' keyword, but this can be replaced by model's
name sometimes - at least that's my experience with 7.01.

For further infos just check this thread.

An update now has finally found it's way to this thread too: Go to this post -HB

Thanks a lot...

Hi all,

I've added html tutorial together with support files, about hair styling with a few modifiers in this version. Mainly it's modeling tutorial, about 'classic' shrink wrap, nurbs surfaces in Softimage, so on.

Link to tutorial
Tutorial online

Cheers

fantastic and greatly appreciated, Mathaeus!

thank you!

Thank you very much for taking the time to put this tutorial together, Mathaeus!

Thank you guys,
Main pack also has a few small fixes, mostly those that are already in tutorial's support file. Of course, there are a lot of others ways for doing hair shape with ICE. For example, I think I got working ICE tree for automatic mini braids generation , which still needs a lot of work. Anyway, this time, I think it's better to go with tutorials about existing stuff.

Compound called 'Follow NURBS' is especially designed for these tiny layers of hairs, so ICE takes care about layering. I made a compact version of compound which in fact has only two or three important parameters, all the rest is about modeling. I hope You'll find the compound enough intuitive.

Cheers

Thank you very much for all the hard work you put into this Mathaeus!

Just one question...How did you do the shading on the hair...is it the normal hair geometry shader or particle volume shader?

Hairs are ICE strands with segment shape, which means standard Mental Ray hair primitive. Just here, hair shader is pHairTK (version of MuhHair), but standard Softimage hair shaders should fit nice too.
To be honest, I didn't played with shading setup that much, making ICE compounds took all my time. It's a bit strange to switch from brutal but logical and predictable ICE world, to something so fluidly as Mental Ray rendering is. Actually I wanted to show hair curls/locks feature, maybe because of that, hairs looks more like some kind of wires. There will be more rendered hairs in the near future.

More details at bottom of this page:
http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=199

Thanks for the info Mathaeus.

Is pHairTK available for xsi? I could only find info on the Maya version. People are raving about the shader...is it better then the built in geometry shader?

I have some free time today...will be playing with your awesome Hair Compounds. Thank you again for making this available to the community. You rock!

Of course, puppet shaders are available for Softimage for a long time:
http://www.puppet.tfdv.com/download/shaders_p_e.shtml
As author (Pavel Ledin) said, core of p_HairTk is a Daniel Rind's MuhHair, written for XSI while ago. Original MuhHair has memory leaking problem with newer Mental Ray versions.

For me, it's nice to have those three highlights in one shader, so I can get more from fewer number of light sources. Also, it seems that p_HairTk doesn't tend to overburn highlights with multiple lights, as XSI hair renderer does, even in linear workflow.
For border transparency feature, it doesn't work well for me, it makes hair segments visible, just as XSI Hair Geometry Shader.

Anyway, there are many ways, where ICE can help in hair shading, for example shadows, some kind of ambient occlusion, simple scattering, so for now I'm again focused on ICE