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) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xsi_list/2erKqUcghpI
(Image)https://groups.google.com/group/xsi_list/attach/994086131ca9460/bear_still.jpg?part=4&view=1
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.
http://ir-ltd.net/hair-farm-hair-into-softimage/
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
http://lesterbanks.com/2013/05/workflow-tips-for-creating-and-grooming-hair-in-softimage/
--
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 softimage.tv 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