I need a hint about XSI Hair

[JPWestmas]

So I can manage some nice looking strait hair with xsi Hair, the guide sculpting is super awesome. What I can't understand is how to texturize the "geometry" of the hair. You know, making the fibers more frizzy or curly without having to sculpt tiny details. Or am I asking too much of this thing? I'd just like to know if this is possible. The presets appear to be useless too.

I found some information on this but it says to increase the hair segments and then when you increase the frizz settings you should get noisy looking hair. I did that but all frizz seems to do is just push the hair roots and tips around, no frizzing going on here.

[Pancho]

Hi Jason (isn't it Jason from the LW forum?),

I'm just looking into XSI and hair too. So far I didn't try to go the native way, but if you want to take a look into strands you'll find unlimited capabilities with kristinka and melena hair.

Cheers
Thomas

[JPWestmas]

Yeah, hi, it's nice to see a familiar name. I've seen Shave do some nice frizzy effects before for gorrilla fur and dry old hair in maya but I can't for the life me figure this one out in xsi. Just seems too cryptic with longer hairs. I guess I just need a really good tutorial on the effects settings. It's just so easy to do in sasquatch and fiber fx, kinda baffled about this.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, I may look into that regardless of how good shave and a haircut may be for small detailing.

[mattmos]

If you're going fo frizz you need a lot of segments to the hair (like 40 or so) and up the angles in the frizz and kink settings.

[JPWestmas]

Cool thanks, but what do you mean by "angles", The frequency?

[JPWestmas]

Ah, I see what is going on, the the frizz and kink are being applied at too large of a scale. How do I scale that down I wonder? I don't see a global scale controller for the growth mesh. The angles in the kink are too large so I get a big globby mess.

My head is about 3 SI units tall. Is it required to be bigger?

Edit: So I scaled up the growth mesh some but that didn't really have any effect on anything. . .hmm

[Tekano]

think there is a hard coded maximum limit to the amount of segment divisions in default XSI hair - something like 16 - which makes curly hair truly impossible.. it will let you put higher numbers in but will not go higher than 16. ridiculous and its been like it since day 1

best bet is to take a look Strands or the excellent Kristinka which has no such limitation

[JPWestmas]

Really? wow, that's horrid. It renders super fast, so what's with the limitation on the segmenting I wonder. I can see why nobody like it I guess.

[JPWestmas]

http://www.matkovic.com/anto/kristinka-hair.html

Yeah that's exactly what I'm trying to do, thanks!

[mattmos]

Are you sure rob? upping segments seems to have an effect here - can go up to 100 and I get a much smoother hair curve in viewport and render.

If you want to tweak standard hair liek this best bet is to use a low number of hairs, switch to render hairs in display settings and you can see what effect you're having with frizz/kink in realtime.

[JPWestmas]

Thanks for the help guys, really.

Here's what I'm talking about. Though I was able to get kink going on, maxing out the kink on the Y axis really didn't change the number of waves in the strands much at all. . .between 16 segments and 50.

[Tekano]

yup am positive, just tried it , its actually the guide hairs created that have a limit of 16 so if you are wanting to do something fancy with curly hair or braids in ponytails then you are screwed as you cannot make default hairs without the guide hairs. so yes you can increase the render segments to any number but the guide hairs is a max of 16. try doing a fancy plait with 16 points! heres a super simple example, I want the hair to follow the red curve - look at what the guide hair does

[JPWestmas]

So my conclusion so far is that there is in fact a clear difference between 16 and 50 segments but just no control over the waviness frequency. Almost no difference in the shapes when cranking the settings, in other words. Messing with the root controls just create giant blobs of messiness.

[JPWestmas]

yup am positive, just tried it , its actually the guide hairs created that have a limit of 16 so if you are wanting to do something fancy with curly hair or braids in ponytails then you are screwed as you cannot make default hairs without the guide hairs. so yes you can increase the render segments to any number but the guide hairs is a max of 16. try doing a fancy plait with 16 points! heres a super simple example, I want the hair to follow the red curve - look at what the guide hair does

Yep, and likewise with the kink setting It looks like I can only get 16 waves going on in a single strand. Just guessing of course but that makes sense now.

[mattmos]

yup am positive, just tried it , its actually the guide hairs created that have a limit of 16 so if you are wanting to do something fancy with curly hair or braids in ponytails then you are screwed as you cannot make default hairs without the guide hairs. so yes you can increase the render segments to any number but the guide hairs is a max of 16. try doing a fancy plait with 16 points! heres a super simple example, I want the hair to follow the red curve - look at what the guide hair does

Ahh see what you mean. That does limit the styling a bit