Hair / Fur / Fibermesh / whatever...

STEVONATRON

I'm looking for opinions on creating the best-looking hair, with great physics. I'm working with 3ds Max and Zbrush.

What is the workflow for making something like Sully off Monsters Inc. these days? Ideally I'd like to see if there's a good thorough tutorial (preferably video) that can succinctly describe a way to achieve, but after hours of searching I can't find anything - not even here on Polycount (unless I've dim-wittingly missed something).

I'm aware of methods such as skinwrapping splines to mesh with a cloth modifier, which looks pretty good but I'm not sure I'm totally convinced.

Any pointers, views, directions from you guys is appreciated!

Mark Dygert

Almost all of the great hair tools are locked behind closed doors.
Almost all of the crappy to mediocre hair tools are expensive.
Almost all of the free hair tools are crap.

STEVONATRON

lol Just what I was thinking.

So maybe I should rephrase the question to 'what is the best workaround for making "great-looking hair"?'

gray

are you talking about realtime hair or off line rendered hair? there is a huge difference.

Moosebish

Almost all of the great hair tools are locked behind closed doors.
Almost all of the crappy to mediocre hair tools are expensive.
Almost all of the free hair tools are crap.

This couldn't be more true.

I work at a studio that uses Shave and Hair Cut for Maya (http://www.joealter.com/shave.htm). It is expensive and hard to get licenses for, but its is at least 2392390472 times better than using Maya's fur tools...

I wish I had more words of encouragement STEVONATRON, but its the sad reality...

MM

http://peregrinelabs.com/yeti/

yeti is pretty good from what i have seen, but it isnt available in USA due to legal issues with JoeAlter's company.
if you are outside USA, it is worth trying.

rube

I've seen a few things from people on different forums using hair farm for max. IT might do what you need. http://www.cyberradiance.com/hairfarm/

gray

MM wrote: »

http://peregrinelabs.com/yeti/

yeti is pretty good from what i have seen, but it isnt available in USA due to legal issues with JoeAlter's company.
if you are outside USA, it is worth trying.

he's looking for max stuff.

edit:
hairfarm + vray for max seems to be the way to go. but i'm over in maya so its second hand advice.

as for physics... thats a heavy wish list any sort of physics you see is generally a tedious and time consuming process and its done in layers and caches. there is no easy hair physics even tho the algorithms exist to do it.

Mark Dygert

The tools in max are a really old version of Shave and Haircut, which has probably continued to grow leaps and bounds as a separate plugin, above what was stuffed in max, way back when.

The question that gray asked is pretty much the $10k question. If you're looking at realtime hair, you're limited to CryEngine, maybe a future release of UDK?
There are a few other companies that have done realtime hair but their tech is normally locked behind their studio doors.
http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Hair+Shader

If you're looking at non-realtime hair
http://www.hair-farm.com/ is great, but pricey.

Structure-Aware showed off some impressive tech at SIGGRAPH 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCgWMIYGbV8

I think everyone dreams of having a simple volumetric hair generation system like Pixar has...
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Hair/paper.pdf

If you're just making hair/fur cards the system inside of max is more than capable of handling that.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1202859#post1202859
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1818212#post1818212

But then again so is anyone who can use photoshop... I don't really use it for hair so much as grass.

gray

also, i'm not being a smartass here, but if your rendering stills then its still perfectly ok to paint hair in photoshop on top of your render. and you can get some really good results like that. you can find a whole heap of tutorials and videos on how to paint hair in photoshop. although if you want something like monsters inc then that technique is probably not going to work.

STEVONATRON

Oops, had notifications switched off! Yeah, sorry, I'm looking at real-time hair.

Specifically, I'm building an animation (almost four years into it now!) and I need good believable hair for a bouncy, lively dog - much like Snowy off Tin Tin. Everything else in the animation has a semi-realistic look so it wouldn't make sense to have chunky polygon hair, or alphas on planes, etc.

I'm going to make a pitch on Kickstarter in the late summer to try and get funding for licenses, so hopefully cost won't be an issue.

Mark Dygert

Well there are simulations for animation that aren't considered "realtime". The realtime hair would be in a game engine that reacts to the players movement as they do whatever. There aren't many of those that are available to anyone, I think only the CryENINGE has realtime hair.

But for rendered animated projects there are quite a few options for that, but most require you to animate the character and then run the simulation. They don't react in realtime in the viewport as you animate, its calculated after the fact.

STEVONATRON

Yeah, I've been doing some heavy research this afternoon into the different options, and I can't justify the prices they're asking for what looks like an updated version of what is already in Max - much like what you said earlier Mark.

And to honest, the latest stuff Pixar have been doing doesn't look that spectacular to me anyway. I refer to Merida's hair in Brave. It's praised as some kind of revolution, but when I saw that movie I started wondering if Pixar are losing their touch, or if they have set up a B-Team or something... I don't mean to sound arrogant by that statement, but it didn't make my jaw drop like previous movies.

gray

'realtime' means 'in game', ie hair in the game engine. it sounds like your doing an animation and rendering off line with mental ray etc. there is no such system that is both real time and rendered in an offline renderer. the hair that you see in films is not real time. any simulations that are done take a long time to solve and they are cached and layered along with keyframe grooming to create per frame renderable hair primitives. that hair is then shaded and rendered per frame. sometimes taking hours for one frame.

Mark Dygert

The cool thing about pixars hair system is that it can generate volumetric hair based on a geometric shape. With tools the Hair/Fur modifier in max you grow spline guides from a surface and then try and comb cut and wrangle it into a useable hair style. People tear their own hair out trying to make something useable.

With pixar's system (and systems like HairFarm) you can start with a geometric shape, a shell and it generates the hair.

http://www.youtube.com/v/M0iB9I_p3uI



With hair/fur in max it grows hair off the surface and its a bitch to try and tangle up. You can grow hair on any surface with max hair but it doesn't flow from one end to the other, it grows like grass off of the surface. Not to mention it craps itself if you try to simulate any hair that is tangled up, it will fall apart or just clip into itself like crazy.

Collision is another huge headache, its slow to simulate and horrible at collision.

I can't stress how awesome it is to actually be able to model clumps of polys and have hair generated from it instead of having to try and comb and cut a fuzzy ball into the right shapes. It's like going to an actual hollywood hairdresser or watch some 3yr old take scissors to her barbie doll.

Systems like hairfarm are incredibly effective and freeing, above the crap system that 3dsmax has. There really is no going back once you use it.

gray

alright let the hair pics roll...

and then, we have this.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCgWMIYGbV8"]Structure-Aware Hair Capture (Siggraph 2013) - YouTube[/ame]

rube

if you're doing a short haired dog in an animation that won't be rendered in realtime you could probably get away with using max's built in hair/fur system.

STEVONATRON

Yeah Mark I agree, it is cool that you can generate hair from geometry - being able to completely figure out how the hair should appear even before it's generated is awesome. But the cost of Hair Farm is astronomical for what is essentially a plugin. If the price was closer to that of dDo/nDo, I would have no problem snapping it up.

Gray, thanks for the info regarding 'real-time' rendering. Clearly I got my wires a bit crossed with the terms and definitions.

I think like Rube has said, for what I need, Max probably can do a decent enough job with what it has already.

STEVONATRON

Almost all of the great hair tools are locked behind closed doors.
Almost all of the crappy to mediocre hair tools are expensive.
Almost all of the free hair tools are crap.

You know, this sums everything up extremely well from what I've seen over the past few days.

If only the art community could pull together and build something that competes with the top studios, they deserve to be snubbed out for being such paranoid fools / or asking ridiculous prices for their products.

gray

studios do not have a 'make awesome hair' button. that simply does not exist. it is the wrong conclusion to think that somehow great hair and fur is easy and fun on large studio productions.

hair and fur is so much work that every large production had a grooming departments. your whole job is to groom cg hair all day... thats how much work is involved. even with all the r&d and resources it can take over a month to do a single hero hair groom.

i think the takeaway from your first battle with hair and fur should be some humility in terms of your expectations. you might even consider skipping the hair for your first animation. you can get some really nice effects with shaders and textures. animated hair and fur requires quite a lot of time and expertise.

if you do try to continue then i would forget about physics. try to get everything as simple as you possibly can. and make sure you do lots of test renders and figure out how long it will take you to render a typical frame of animation. you may find out that even a with a simple hair render that your animation could take months to finish rendering assuming you do not have a render farm.

Jedi

Heres an animation test i did while I was doing RnD for hair. Its shave and a haircut, 3delight, custom hair shader based off of "stuart little". It rendered really fast, about 5 seconds per frame, with motion blur. 3delight or prman and shave and deep shadow maps along with a good shader that you have written and understand is a very killer combination.

IMHO long hair styles are more trouble than their worth and you can get the hair "feeling" across just fine with a shorter style for both male and female characters.

gray

@jedi

nice animation! thanks for sharing. can you possibly post a link to the paper which describes the method your referring to that was used for your shader? if its available online that is.

is there any refraction transmission with your example, or is it entirely rasterization and shadow maps. i suspect the latter due to how fast it is.

i have taken a look at eze shader for 3delight. but i just do not have the time to do any proper tests with it. perhaps you can release your shader to the public and get more feedback if thats what your looking for.

http://www.ezequielm.com/iFrameContent/ezeShaderSuite/ezeShaderSuite.htm

unfortunately we do not get to choose the hair style of the characters. the directors do and we have to 'make it happen'. if they want long hair then they get long hair. so even tho i agree that long hair is a pain in the butt its a fact of life. and systems that can do any type of hair are the systems that will be adopted.

Jedi

gray wrote: »

@jedi

nice animation! thanks for sharing. can you possibly post a link to the paper which describes the method your referring to that was used for your shader? if its available online that is.

is there any refraction transmission with your example, or is it entirely rasterization and shadow maps. i suspect the latter due to how fast it is.

i have taken a look at eze shader for 3delight. but i just do not have the time to do any proper tests with it. perhaps you can release your shader to the public and get more feedback if thats what your looking for.

http://www.ezequielm.com/iFrameContent/ezeShaderSuite/ezeShaderSuite.htm

unfortunately we do not get to choose the hair style of the characters. the directors do and we have to 'make it happen'. if they want long hair then they get long hair. so even tho i agree that long hair is a pain in the butt its a fact of life. and systems that can do any type of hair are the systems that will be adopted.

Thanks :thumbup:

Im using a modified version of this and this

STEVONATRON

gray wrote: »

studios do not have a 'make awesome hair' button. that simply does not exist. it is the wrong conclusion to think that somehow great hair and fur is easy and fun on large studio productions.

Seems I might have conveyed my point of view wrong; I really don't believe, and would not expect studios to have a magic formulae and a 5min workflow for making great looking hair. But, nevertheless, they are (probably understandably) secretive regarding their methods/tools of creating hair and the cost of their plugins are extortionate. It leaves me slightly frustrated, but I don't think I have unrealistic expectations.

STEVONATRON

*Bump*

Hi fellas, so I'm still chugging away at this. I'm currently working on applying feathers, using Max's hair and fur tool with instance nodes, to a Secretary bird which itself has raised bigger problems than I could have imagined.



What I'm finding particularly difficult is that I can't seem to rotate the instance nodes on their axis, so if the geo' arches a certain direction, I can't swivel it round.

Another problem is that I don't seem to get the option to make mutant 'hairs' to mix up the colours or type of feather.

Any ideas? Hair Farm? *resigned anticipation of emptying my wallet*

gray

having failed many times with hair i can only suggest to set expectations low.

i can't help much with this one because i'm in maya atm. but in general if you run into a significant technical hurdle its best to try a different approach.

if you can do a global rotate on all the instances at once in a hair system you might try to apply a large amount of hair nodes with masks. you will at least have some local control by adjusting a different rotation for each hair system.

STEVONATRON

Hey Gray, my problem is that I always have unattainable expectations of myself haha I appreciate you might not be able to help due to this being a Max issue, but I'll elaborate anyway with the hope someone else might be able to pitch in.

So here's a pic to try and further demonstrate the problem...



...It doesn't matter how much I brush the hairs (feathers/instance nodes), the orientation does not change. I don't know if Max has some sneaky option hidden away somewhere that I've missed, but as far as I can see, you can't rotate the nodes. As you can see from the picture above, this is massive problem because we'll see big missing patches where the strands are oriented side-ways from the base mesh.

I've actually downloaded the demo of Hair Farm, and much to my misery, it really does look a million times better than Max's own tool. Straight away, I can rotate the nodes, make them sing if I want. But I really want to be sure that Max itself can't fix these issues before I go sinking $700 on it.

Mark Dygert

Max hair isn't really designed to work that way, I don't think there is an option to change the orientation of each hair/node, so I think that's about as far as it will let you go.

You might have better luck using "object painter" to place feathers, that way the pivot point of each feather object will have a pivot point in the right spot and you can tweak it afterward if you need to. It should do a much better job of aligning the feathers to the surface instead of to a world axis.

You could also try using particle flow to spawn instances of feathers on the surface of the mesh. You can control several settings using vertex paint as a mask. There also is the "birth paint" operator which can also be helpful in deciding where particles go.

I'm not sure Hair Farm will get you any better results, I don't remember it having any controls for tweaking the orientation of the individual nodes, but maybe it does... Both it and max hair seem similar in that they like to treat each strand of hair as a tube and don't really bother with the orientation. They handle radial instances just fine, but when you start using planes it starts to fall apart.

STEVONATRON

It's funny you mention that about Max struggling with planes Mark - I've continued playing around with this, and like most things that seem problematic, I did one simple thing that I really should have had the common sense to do in the first place and that's to split the plane's segments length-ways and bend them - so we effectively have half a tube, if you get what I mean. Yes it means more poly's but it definitely looks a million times better because there's always a better chance of a face being angled towards the camera.

Anyway, I'm going to continue drubbing away at this and will undoubtedly update you guys with some more of my noob trials and tribulations.