Baking hair & fur from max using Projection

Marcus_Aseth

Hi guys,I have a little problem,I'm driving the hair & fur modifier using some splines but I cannot bake it down using the projection modifier since in the "Reference Geometry" tab it asks for a mesh. Problem is,if I turn the hair & fur into mesh I get a different look from the hair & fur render,so that's not an option...
I just would like that the projection modifier sees the hair & fur render so to bake it into a VrayCompleteMap I could later use for my hair diffuse texture.
There is a way to have this happening?!
For now the closest thing I can do is to take a screenshot of my render and paste it into photoshop,but since the projection mesh is rounded,of course I'm not getting the right distortion and bake from different angles out of my flat screenshot,so this would involve a lot of fixing inside photoshop...

Marcus_Aseth

Here you can better see why converting the hair & fur is not an option.
That's why I just need the projection baking the Hair & Fur

Obscura

Probably thats just the material that the hair&fur modifier applies, and you loose after making geo from it. You can drop together a similar mat manually, and bake using that. Mesh from spline should have basic uv coordinates, so you can even make gradients. But depending on where it will be rendered later, this much specular reflection (that you want to bake in) isn't optimal.

Marcus_Aseth

Obscura,you're missing the point. Mesh from Hair and Fur is giving me a different hair distribution from the hair & fur setting,that's why I posted an image.Therefore I can't have a "planned" workflow that way,if I where to go with the mesh,then I would just be making random hairs...

Obscura

Ah okay, sorry. I have no idea then.

DavidCruz

I'll do a test of two to see what can be done but for a quick answer it seems if you just spammed a bunch of splines /converted to polys / then mesh if you need them to be mesh, perhaps add a subd modifier into the splines if converting to poly's/mesh down grades them as you show in your example image.

Then after the "downgraded" hair strands are solid objects just duplicate them, as in the spline example you show that iteration is not far from the original, however that shimmer/shine is lost.

Perhaps adding a few lights into the rendered version when you bake it out in projection, I would save the black/white/grey version the window spits out in the render preview.

Such as when you rendering/project a normal map you see the "greyscale" version and not the normal map that is exported, the preview image is lost but before closing that window you can save it out as whatever you want.

Hope that helped, if not possibly showed someone a new thing they might be able to use.

Otherwise if you have a friend or own maya that GMH2 Maya Hair Script for sale looks great for this stuff.

Marcus_Aseth

David,that mesh is not obtained by the spline,is the hair & fur option to convert it to mesh. Same with the splines,is the hair & fur option to convert to spline(and I just gave it some thickness so that is visible in the render). And in both cases,it is converting the hair & fur into something that look different,like if it had less density,like if some hairs are not beign converted to mesh or splines for some reasons. My concern is not really about the material or shimmering,which I know I can get back with some material setting,the problem here is just the conversion giving a different density thus my need to bake the hair & fur instead of baking the converted to mesh or spline version,which is different from tha hair I do each time

I think my original question kind of got lost and my example is generating more confusion about the nature or my problem,so I ask it more clearly here: someone knows of a way to force 3ds max's Projection modifier into see & bake the Hair & Fur modifier? :poly122:

Eric Chadwick

I would design the fur to work as a texture for a flat mesh, then map the finished texture set onto curved geometry. That way you could use a standard camera and render, to capture the fur as a texture.

Marcus_Aseth

@Eric: my same conclusion,I'll have no other choice than do it that way apparently

Yoji

 Sorry if this is a necro post but I'm facing similar problems and I think I found a solution to yours! I don't think you made your hairs at full display control so that's why it looks different after conversion. I think Arrimus explains it the best way here from 5:40 https://youtu.be/nEPvLEa65i4?t=5m38s your hair count and hair display percentage may be at fault, that's what I'm trying to say,
hope it helps! 
 Now I'm struggling with baking all the hair cards in one big uv map after I've placed them on my model.

bkost

@Yoji

Hey man, what I would suggest is creating 4 or 5 cards. Lay them out to create UVs. Then duplicate.

I guess that is future reference unless you want to recreate your hair. With all your hair cards in place, you can attempt stacking the UVs on top of eachother.

Here's a breakdown which I found very helpful. https://cdn0.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/335/696/large/dmitrij-leppee-tutorial-02low.jpg?1460444998

Spoody

Hair and Fur - Tools - Render Settings - Hair and Fur - Hair Rendering Options - change to geometry

Eric Chadwick

Spoody said:

Hair and Fur - Tools - Render Settings - Hair and Fur - Hair Rendering Options - change to geometry

You know the last reply is from 8 months ago? And the OP is from 17 months ago?

thomasp

is there a big advantage to baking this kind of hair system output as opposed to creating the texture yourself? i've only ever struggled trying to create something that looks natural and forms the desired shape with these tools. it would seem just laying down a texture the manual way would get you exactly the shape and density you need without all the slider pulling and re-rendering?

i've started to use a vector graphics app (affinity in my case) to handle exactly this task and keep the strands in a non-destructive format as opposed to drawing them in a bitmap texture. pretty quick to just bang out a couple of strands, duplicate, tweak, adjust thickness and strand shape, layer them as needed, apply layer styles so you get some depth into the normal map bake.

musashidan

@thomasp , interesting approach. Similar in a sense to laying out curves in Zbrush. Could you provide some sample images?

thomasp

musashidan said:

@thomasp , interesting approach. Similar in a sense to laying out curves in Zbrush. Could you provide some sample images?

this is how i'm using it. it's affinity but i'm assuming features like layer styles and stroke control are universal. perhaps you could even do it in photoshop? never looked into it's vector tools. upside to this over pixel based source assets is of course the potential to tweak- and re-use elements.


the result can then be put into a layered bitmap document structure to extract and adjust further passes as needed. i normally only use normal, opacity and something akin to a cavity map though. color is provided by vertex colors in my method as mentioned over here: http://polycount.com/discussion/171496/vertex-colors-vs-bitmap-texture-cost-performance-considerations

Kiyamlol

thomasp said:

I know this is old but how do you do those strokes? |I am guessing this is in photoshop. As for the normals is it the nvidia filter?

thomasp

Kiyamlol said:

I know this is old but how do you do those strokes? |I am guessing this is in photoshop. As for the normals is it the nvidia filter?

that's affinity designer and an old polycount tool for generating normalmaps from greyscale, njob.

i still use parts of this method but instead of working strictly in 2D i now convert vectorgraphics into splines and give them depth like so -


gives the normal maps a lot more volume and makes for interesting edge highlights. also you can build up a library of hairclumps over time to reuse.

radiancef0rge

ugh, I just spent like a month writing custom maya tools that do the exact same thing. that looks dope. \o/

musashidan

Thanks for the follow-up posts @thomasp didn't see it back in Jan.

thomasp

radiancef0rge said:

ugh, I just spent like a month writing custom maya tools that do the exact same thing. that looks dope. \o/

sounds interesting. can you talk about what it does exactly? tied into xgen in some way or is it intended to be used with hand drawn/imported curves?

radiancef0rge

It's a little more complicated I guess and I don't use xgen unfortunately. The user draws course data with a custom curve tool, I then split and jitter the curve so one curve becomes 4 unique curves. Curves are then extruded with a random radius whose min and max are defined by the user. Then I color the strands with a triple switch and ramp node, so each strand gets a random color from the ramp. Then I render to texture the screen and export the meshes to substance batch bake for ao and thickness.  This way I get geometry for the hair strands which makes baking easier and strands can be regenerated or randomized at any time. Having the actual geometry is great. 

It works for me pretty well, time will tell if the character guys actually like the pipeline.

disanski

Oh wow some fantastic results @thomasp . What format do yo export those curves in so you can import them into 3d package. Also do you manipulate the splines after you import them in the 3d package?

@radiancef0rge this sounds like an awesome tool man

thomasp

disanski said:

What format do yo export those curves in so you can import them into 3d package. Also do you manipulate the splines after you import them in the 3d package?

i export SVG from affinity and load that into blender. there's tons of editing that i do after import, including optimizing the curves. i think i spent about a day tweaking the import shown above.
what doing them first in 2D in a separate step helps with immensely is to just lay a hair clump down in a natural drawing fashion though as if you were painting it in photoshop. i never quite get into the flow like that with spline/curve drawing tools inside a 3D app.

disanski

Ah thank you for the detailed answer man. I also prefer painting the cards by hand and I am gonna try this next.

MonkTiger

@thomasp thank you for sharing njob! I've been searching everywhere for how to convert greyscale into normalmap and finally i found it.

I'd love to learn in-depth as to how you approach your hair- like vectorgraphics(?) into s plines (idk how you do that) and such. 
"the result can then be put into a layered bitmap document structure to extract and adjust further passes as needed. "i normally only use normal, opacity and something akin to a cavity map though"

Can you share with use how exactly you go on about doing this? Thank you!

AFsoft

thomasp said:

Kiyamlol said:

I know this is old but how do you do those strokes? |I am guessing this is in photoshop. As for the normals is it the nvidia filter?

that's affinity designer and an old polycount tool for generating normalmaps from greyscale, njob.

i still use parts of this method but instead of working strictly in 2D i now convert vectorgraphics into splines and give them depth like so -


gives the normal maps a lot more volume and makes for interesting edge highlights. also you can build up a library of hairclumps over time to reuse.

this is 2 years, can you be more specific on the software name ? designer ? and is there any tutorial about it ?
Because , i have done a render to texture in 3DS MAX. here is the result :