Extruding Splines along Vertex

Olingova

Hello!

I am currently working with G Fur plug in for UE4, and need to make Spline guide to chose the direction of the fur.

( http://gim.studio/gfur-user-manual/#1511115919194-c6e95b4a-d9a0 )

On Maya, all the hair plugin i know cannot create guides (converted later in splines) from the vertices, and i'm forced to use 3dsMax.



Is there any technique de create those splines from the vertices on maya? On XGen or another plug in? Am i missing something? Thanks a lot!

thomasp

do the guides have to sit exactly at every vertex for this UE plugin to work?

if not, look into zbrush-fibermesh: style as needed (you can tweak the fibermesh externally, too as long as the topology stays intact, then just reimport into the subtool), export as many guides as required (visibility slider lets you reduce their numbers), import into maya and edit there. helpful to have decent functionality to reduce the number of CVs on a curve while preserving the shape. no idea what maya offers in terms of functionality to do this though.

Eric Chadwick

Look into MCG for 3ds Max, it's a procedural geometry tool. You can use it to generate those splines, and even to add some of the curvature automatically.

Olingova

Yeah the splines got to sit exactly in the right position to work i'm using this plug in: G Fur

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/gfur

Eric Chadwick said:

Look into MCG for 3ds Max, it's a procedural geometry tool. You can use it to generate those splines, and even to add some of the curvature automatically.

Yup i tried it it zorks great but i just wanted to try to do it in maya to avoid multi import export and mistakes associated to those manipulations

poopipe

use xgen

If you make a curve, select the verts on your animal and run this (nasty mel I googled cos I couldn't be bothered to write any python at this time of day)  it'll distribute the curves at each vert.  (curve1 being the name of the curve) . You'll want a better script as this doesn't appear to take into account mesh normals

string $verts[] = `ls -sl -fl`;
for($vert in $verts)
{
select $vert;
float $position[] = `xform -q -ws -t`;
string $duplicate[] = `duplicate curve1`;

setAttr ($duplicate[0] + ".translateX") $position[0];
setAttr ($duplicate[0] + ".translateY") $position[1];
setAttr ($duplicate[0] + ".translateZ") $position[2];
} 

You can then convert the curves to xgen guides

After that, in the generate primitives tab tell it to place a hair spline at each guide location 

After that convert to the result to groomable splines for combing etc. 

Iirc this should work on maya 2017 - I'm not sure the interactive grooming was usable on 2016

This link covers cacheing the interactive groom and reimporting the splines

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2017/ENU/?guid=GUID-28367DFD-A479-4E29-A691-6381CC8AF384

Olingova

poopipe said:

use xgen

If you make a curve, select the verts on your animal and run this (nasty mel I googled cos I couldn't be bothered to write any python at this time of day)  it'll distribute the curves at each vert.  (curve1 being the name of the curve) . You'll want a better script as this doesn't appear to take into account mesh normals

string $verts[] = `ls -sl -fl`;
for($vert in $verts)
{
select $vert;
float $position[] = `xform -q -ws -t`;
string $duplicate[] = `duplicate curve1`;

setAttr ($duplicate[0] + ".translateX") $position[0];
setAttr ($duplicate[0] + ".translateY") $position[1];
setAttr ($duplicate[0] + ".translateZ") $position[2];
} 

You can then convert the curves to xgen guides

After that, in the generate primitives tab tell it to place a hair spline at each guide location 

After that convert to the result to groomable splines for combing etc. 

Iirc this should work on maya 2017 - I'm not sure the interactive grooming was usable on 2016

This link covers cacheing the interactive groom and reimporting the splines

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2017/ENU/?guid=GUID-28367DFD-A479-4E29-A691-6381CC8AF384

Thanks you soooo much for taking the time to answer i will give a try as soon as i come back and post here for people needing the info!