Maya Hair System Issue

kmacneil91 · Mar 2017

Hey guys!
Has anyone had issues with Maya hair systems creating spikes as seen below? The file appears to be fine, but after saving and re-opening, I get this effect. I started with Fibermesh from Zbrush and converted to curves.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/cl/bfvjh0k32mpl.png

My original file looked like this when rendering:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/6e/g04eaemt8bw1.png

Thank you!

kmacneil91 · Mar 2017

Someone from Autodesk recommended updating my driver, doing a clean install, and also changing these settings in Maya:

Settings and Preferences > Preferences > Settings > Animation > Evaluation.. switch from Parallel to DG mode..

But these are the results:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/g7/mzmo5zq3di7l.png

Any other suggestions are very appreciated!

throttlekitty · Mar 2017

Wish I could help, but I've only seen this rarely on polygons when doing extrudes. For a while I was on a *very* old video card while waiting on a replacement and this was pretty constant, what video card are you running?

I suppose for empirical testing, you could do a real quick recreation of the hair starting with only the head to see if there's something wrong with your current scene.

kmacneil91 · Mar 2017

Hey there, here are my specs:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/1v/rhrz07oy1rsm.png

And that's the thing - when I re-create the hair and load it in the scene, it's fine. Then I save the scene, re-open, and bam, it's like this again. Do you think this video card is insufficient?

Thanks!

throttlekitty · Mar 2017

Your video card is plenty sufficient, I wouldn't rule hardware out, but it's safe to ignore that for now.

I'm not super proficient in the hair systems, but if you can share your scene I or someone else could take a look see.

kmacneil91 · Mar 2017

Thanks so much! I'll have access to all my files tomorrow - I'll get the project to you then.

kmacneil91 · Mar 2017

Here's the project file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ttvwz2wsd1ark5x/Character-project.zip?dl=0

Let me know if you run into any issues - the file does take a while to load on my machine. Also, ignore the lack of shoes and weapon yet... these were still in progress.

Thank you for your time!

throttlekitty · Mar 2017

So for reference here, I'm running on a GTX980Ti and maya 2016.5, so no Arnold here. Probably not a huge deal except for the shader- I'm not sure what the viewport uses, but that may be something to look into for your problem. I simply get the PFX shading which matches your screenshot. Either way, the scene loads slow for me too, but I don't get hairs flying into space either.

Something I notice from your picture is that most of the glitch seems to happen around the ear area. I also see that there's a lot of hair inside the face, but I can't find the poly shape you originally used for the hair system. You could improve the look and a bit of performance by fixing that shape into a "scalp only" type of model. I remember that with nHair, intersecting geo and overlapping UVs can cause issues, so that may be something to look into? Not sure what to suggest since I don't see anything visually wrong on my end.

I've been digging around the scene for a while and can't find anything technically wrong, I'm not sure what to say. Have you tried the legacy viewports? Did you try the suggested clean install?

kmacneil91 · Mar 2017

Thanks for checking it out! It's good to know it doesn't happen on all computers at least. I tried all 3 viewport renderers with no luck.
I did try the clean install as well.

Here's the tutorial I used, transferring Fibermesh to curves (so not exactly the poly shape method):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H975_S3Qwhg

I appreciate all of the advice!

kmacneil91 · Mar 2017

Good news - it appears to be working now! I played around with some of the settings for the hair system, and changing the noise method under displacements to Surface UV instead of random seems to have done the trick:

gem2492 · Mar 2017

Hey. I know you've already solved your problem, but I suggest using XGen next time. nHair is already outdated and, in my opinion, XGen is far easier to use.