Please help: Trouble Grooming Fur/Hair using Modo 10

Phil-Sanchez

EDIT:
I've done some more experimenting, and by removing all but 1 of the guides, the hair suddenly behaves exactly as expected. So it seems like the guides are interfering with each other, even when the blend amount = 0%.

Is there any other way to limit this influence? (I'd like to work with more than just 1 hair guide)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Basically, I'm using Modo 10 Steam Edition to create hair that I plan to bake down to hair cards. However, I keep getting bugs/glitches when working with the hair.

I'd seriously appreciate any help; I've literally been scouring the internet for days, but I still can't find answers, and I'm at the end of my rope. 

1.) The placement of the hair guides doesn't always match the placement of the rendered hair


2.) the advanced viewport won't display any preview fibers, no matter how high I set the Display density in Properties>FurMaterial>GL Display


 3.) The biggest issue is that the guides don't seem to accurately control the length of the fibers
(even when the Fur Material's Guide Properties have been set to "Range")



Again, if anyone knows solutions to this, I'd seriously appreciate the help!

WilliamVaughan

Your size Jitter of 10% may be affecting the length.

Phil-Sanchez

WilliamVaughan said:

Your size Jitter of 10% may be affecting the length.

Thanks for the suggestion! Even with size Jitter at 0%, it doesn't seem to make an impact. 

thomasp

i admit i have zero idea about this modo issue of yours but am curious why you would want perfectly straight hair baked onto textures? i'd at least expect some waviness and clumping. but straight like that it will hardly ever look natural and just highlight every lowpoly corner in your geometry.

what would the advantage be of creating those straight elements via baking over - say - firing up photoshop and doing a few quick strokes on the canvas? are you after a bunch of render-passes? if it's all flat like it seems to be then e.g. a normal map or depth pass will not do much that you couldn't create manually.

Phil-Sanchez

@thomasp: sorry for the confusion. I am actually trying to bake textures with waviness/clumping/etc, I just figured my images would explain things clearer I left out those extra effects

Here's an image with guides closer to what I'm trying for (the rendered hair has the same issues I mentioned above)

thomasp

alright! in this case i'd recommend creating just a few variations of these wavy strands on individual texture islands so they can be assembled into the final shape, layered and individually deformed to make it look more 3-dimensional.

still doesn't solve your technical issue i'm afraid.

Phil-Sanchez

@thomasp thanks for the recommendation, I was definitely planning on having a bunch of different hair textures and layering them into the final shape. 

Still trying to figure out the technical issues, I think I got it working briefly last night, just need to figure out what fixed things