Maya Hair Plugin - GMH2

[benmalartre]

Wow! Nice Render!!
Can you share a scene?
I never was able to get so good result with xsi hair shader...
Thanks to testing my scene, too bad the modeling is so dirty

[FXDude]

Thanks! :] and putting together a scene is in the works!

Also, sorry I failed to specify, it's native XSI hair using P_HairTK shader, and that sequence was from a bunch of passes spread-out across a number of test scene versions with different light setups, setttings, shaders.. that I just rendered them all and then used some of them to comp together while discarding others. (to more quickly experiment with various elements because light colored hair can be somewhat more difficult), and I'm puttting it back together for it to come straight out in 1 pass with a simple setup.

So Stay tuned!


And by the way, your hair system is so awesome! (fast stable and intuitive!)

It's like directly modeling hair lol

And many were looking for something like that for a quite a while!

Also if you don't mind, I would like to put out a version of your compound exposing and organizing a bunch of setting buried inside.

Every time I went to adjust something I discovered new features (lots of features!) that were hidden in there

Kudos! and thanks for such an elaborate yet easy system!

[Hirazi Blue]

Maybe you could add some tutorial/documentation to Furax, so people less gifted like me can understand what's going on...

[FXDude]

No prob, I'll be sure to include basic usage instructions & screen shots along with the compound

[Hirazi Blue]

Thanks in advance... ;)

[Hirazi Blue]

Can anyone please guide me through the steps necessary to set up "Furax" properly?

[Hirazi Blue]

BUMP...

[benmalartre]

Hello, I just can't make a proper tutorial right now as I'm not at home, I'm in england for a job
but for a basic setup you need a polymesh emitter, a polygon cage with two ICE compound(InitMesh and DeformMesh) and a "Root Vertices" cluster, and two points cloud
a guide one and a render one. When I come back in France I'll try to make a tutorial and proper packaging of the tool, but It will be in september...

[Hirazi Blue]

Thanks...

[FXDude]

Hi Sorry for the delay, (one thing led to another)
but just to give an update,

Introducing HairDew !



(Don't know if possible to can scale video portals, but there's the full screen button if too small)

A set of ICE and RenderTree compounds, or more accurately, an importable setup from which you just drop an emitter and obstacles in their respective groups.

The Dynamics is a compounded ver. of Roughy's Strand Collision Framework
Strand Collision Framework
https://vimeo.com/76018502
exposing it's ice tree parameters, and embeddeing whatever I found useful (forces and things) for making all sorts of hair behaviours (also featuring makeshift tabs)


... and the rest is quite literally a fusion of Melena and Kristika (Kristi-lena?) hair.


RRay's GroomTools is also initialized on the strands, which allows for the most artistic direction, allowing to curl around curls and things with it's layered appraoch, yet (without having investegated deeply) I wasn't able to get stable clones around guides as it's using closest locations to nearest guides , which I don't see how that could not be ever changing across frames, but I'm positive there a way to establish closest locations once at the start, and keep their values for the rest (?)... I should ask RRAY !!


The ICETreeTrace tool was my friend, to trace back where various attributes were set and what was piped into them, in each of the tool's respective sample scenes/compounds, all to make their main compounds work together. (not all of them yet)

On a side note, already to a large degree can ICE nodes be combined (dealing with the same things), but the fact that not only simple but elaborate tools can be combined in such a way can really make you rethink about all that's over at RRay.de!




Otherwise guides sim is pretty FAST (15 fps), which on their own can give a good Idea of motion at good framerates, but even with some some fair amounts of filling runs at a quite playbackable 4 to 8 fps, which makes for swift playblasts of hair volume that very accurately represents what comes out of rendering. (volume wise)

It's also pretty easy (and fun ) and strands can of course be rendered with Arnold or Redshift, but is also made to render nice and fast with plain vanilla XSI (dead renderer in dead software lol)

One of the main point of the shader compound was to get good enough (while faked) ambient lighting with directional bias, using a superwide volume shadow map essentially making like some very diffuse overall wraparound lighting (initially was raytraced soft shadows, yet for such diffuse light shadowmaps are cheaper with little or no compromise for looks),
along with accurate (traced) direct light transmission inside the hair volume.

The shading node in the compound initially was a HairTK shader as it was quite well featured, yet which I found be less than optimal when used with ray switching. It thrown no errors, but was somehow 3x as long ... as what I then used, which was the 'original' XSI muhHair (yes from 2003 ;D) which was the basis of Puppet HairTK shader, and whatever missing feature was easily reproduced with regular rendertree nodes.

The setup has completely independent hair optimized lighting, yet still exists among, and casts / receives shadows to and from other scene objects, so you position a main light roughly from where light comes from, an "ambient light" (and/or perhaps more lights to make highlights)
color them (perhaps picking colors from a gray ball in your scene to set ambient and main lights ) and that's it!

You can modulate/drive any parameter with wheightmaps, StrandRatios (gradient along strand), strand segment distance to nulls ... with outputs which are themselves modulate-able with Fcuves or with animatable gradient ramp remappings, ...... . . plus if you happen to come across a limitation, overriding the limitation is entirely possible with most of the inner workings being right there and human decipherable (yep ICE)

The dancer shown is RedJaiqua with a dance mocap and no weighting whatsoever, just the compiled DeltaMush Ice node which is awesome


So stay tuned for more, will probably start a new thread with the importable model attached!

And I may post other details when I get back this evening.

Cheers!

[Hirazi Blue]

Very impressive...
When will you get around to release the system (and (what) will you charge for it)?

[FXDude]

Thanks!

All that's left is compounding/exposing the "Kristi-lena" styling Ice tree like I did for the StrandCollisionFrameWork, but UN-like it which was put together at the same time as actually making various sims with it, the styling tree hasn't been compounded as it was constantly ever changing or even starting over completely a few times.

Also I didn't investigate further about Furax node, because I though making strips or tubes from strands would have been much trickier than it turned out to be, which I found out only just recently (that it was easy and just as zippy ), so I may give Furax another go at some point.

Otherwise it'll be 499$ .. with a permanent 499$ sale rebate (=0) divided between all the authors of the tools used to make it

[Hirazi Blue]

That's very generous...

[FXDude]

I see it as "give and take"

[rray]

FxDEWD wow that looks like it will be a great hair simulation tool, and it appears so unexpected (I think It deserves a thread of its own)

If you ask me , that's a good question about the GroomTools, that I don't know the answer to yet ^^ but I will investigate!
I think storing a lot of neighbor data was too memory hungry that's why I didn't do it.
It could be that ICE somehow allows to look up everything at frame 1, or if all else fails a fixed copy could be used for looking up neighbors.
But there could be a simpler solution too, for example storing the neighbor locations, not any data. Will have a look if that's possible.

Thanks for planning to release it also with the generous rebate!

[druitre]

Very nice and generous indeed, FXDude. Like you said, there's lots of ICE-stuff around for making hair but nothing focused on a user-friendly workflow. Sure you'd be able to somehow get done what you want but not without loads of digging around and trial and error. All of which you'd likely have forgotten the next time you need to do some hair. Very cool if you have managed to sort this out and present a clear workflow.
Also might add this will be useful for a lot of things besides hair, everything strand and dynamics oriented can benefit.

(BTW, I second Rray's idea this warrants a thread of its own.)