Hy guys i rarely look back at Maya but am quite impressed by the presentation of their new hair solver:



Now of course as usual it might not work so hot in practice but there are a two things i really llike:

1- the ability to generate hair from geo

2- the way it seems to hold it shape during simulation

Now i've played with Melena a little and especially 1 is nor possible afaik. This stuff might be do-able with Kristinka but as much as i think Anto's a great guy i find his stuff near impossible to comprehend...

EDIT: hmm embedded video isn't showing up in my browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xeWisUaz3bE

Moderator edit: Yes it does, if you use the tags correctly... - HB

Moderator edit, continued: Hovering over the tag name in the editor gives a short explanation,
more info can always be found in The tag FAQ - HB also, obviously

kp edit: whoops yeah i get now, sorry HB!

The Maya nHair does look pretty impressive.

Essentially its now the Nucleus solver that's driving nHair so it improves things abit.

I'm waiting to see some of this stuff though
http://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/08/09/autodesk-gets-exclusive-licence-for-disneys-xgen-technology/

Hmm yes but i really like the way the geometry seemed to generate a volume of hair - been thinking about it and this must be do-able in ICE: if you can fill a volume with particles why not with strands? I should look into this even though i have no need for it at all atm



That sounds even more interesting!

If you check out this guy's demo reel, he uses geometry extrusions and point indexing to generate a strand volume. Very cool stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=579TxZhgapQ

Since ICE modeling in SI 2012, as well as SDK improvements in... 2011.5 I think, UI widgets an so... it should be *more* doable than before. I had something like, done even only with ICE in 7.01, but it was a whole small system, a lot copies of this or that just in order to work. Not that much for 'comprehend'
Definitively not just a fill in volume, decision about direction and distribution should be done, too. And this decision could affect the final look, dramatically. Achieving the acceptable final result, could take a lot of time, re-work of entire concept, so on.

Now someone *just* need to do that. I wouldn't, I don't need this...

Simulation engine looks interesting, don't know is it possible to do something like, using Syflex on curves, Momentum or so..

mesh based hair gen is cool, but if you worked with hairfarm for example, you know how annoying it can be...

@Mathaeus: Yeah as you told me before i should just get more familiar with "basic" ICE, it's just hard sometimes to study something so general - i tend to learn by crisis if you know what i mean

Like the fact today i needed to make dynamic cables so i did some googling and found syflex curves > deformed the cable geo by curve > tada!

Perhaps i'll take on the strands volume someday but as said i dont actualy need it either, I'd probably try to tackle the "ICE greeble" thing first - been wanting to do that one for a long time!

@Origin: Really? Why?

That does sound great! Bellsey, I don't know if you have contact with the decision makers higher up on what new technology goes to what platform, but if you want to mention to those people, that if Autodesk wanted to really sell a lot of Suites, then it would be the smartest move to put that XGen into Softimage first - that would sell the most Suite seats -fast. If they put it into Maya first, that would do little for the sales of Suites.

I do have contact with people in the product teams, but whether they listen to anything say, well who knows, lol.
However, in that article Disney do say that Maya is at the core of the pipline.