I've never used Yeti but I've heard good things about it, making it the
topmost solution on my list of things to check out in the future.
I'd also go for that if you are familiar with Maya and don't live in the
US (copy/paste from their website: "Please note: Due to circumstances
outside of our control, we are unable to sell Yeti to customers located in
the US"). But I won't start another Joe Alter bashing thread here...
Especially the dynamics is where Maya seems the provide the longest list
of options (nHair, Yeti,...), and that's really crucial for longer hair.
Some thoughts on rendering: Most renderers handle hair quite well, unless
it needs to be transparent,
which it almost always needs to be (usually a gradient with increasing
transparency from root to tip) to make the hair look softer. Without it it
just looks really brushy and thick. Ok for short, thick hair like on a
tigers nose and beard stubbles, but not the fluffy stuff on hamsters or
human heads even. Making the hair very thin towards the end is an
alternative, but usually requires to bump up the AA samples, with the
usual render time hit that goes hand in hand with.
From all renderers I tried (Arnold, Vray, 3Delight, mentalray), 3Delight
was the only one that deilvered decent performance, especially in
combination with motion blur, and has, imho, the single most beautiful
hair shading I've seen, including handling GI very well. All others grind
to a halt in such cases in comparison, with Vray being extremely slow in
both rendering and export of hair strands , Arnold having the shortest
TTFP (time to first pixel) with very fast export, and 3Delight being in
the middle between the two in terms of export times and TTFP, but fastest
in rendering overall (by leaps and bounds).
It does require a bit more fiddling with lights (deep shadow maps) to get
that slight translucent effect on back- and rimlights. See this thread:
http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1275&start=20
I was longing for redshift too, but it became clear shortly before I went
into the project that it would not be ready in time for hair rendering. A
version supporting strands was just released yesterday, but there is no
hair shader yet afaik.
Good luck, and thanks for the links, some where news to me.
Stefan
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
--
-------------------------------------------
Stefan Kubicek
-------------------------------------------
keyvis digital imagery
Alfred Feierfeilstraße 3
A-2380 Perchtoldsdorf bei Wien
Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at ste...@keyvis.at
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