Creating and modifying planes from splines [3ds Max]

Ruflse

Hey guys, I've been searching everywhere for a way to create planes with UV controlled by splines in 3ds Max to make placing hair cards a lot easier in that program. The only way I know similar to what I'm trying to accomplish is by using a set of modifiers like I'm showing you here:



This is obviously not the cleanest solution: the UV of the plane most of the time get messed up when I make some deformations and I can't really modify it easily like by changing the edge loops and tapering or twisting the plane.
This is basically what I would like to do but in 3ds Max:



Any ideas?

coven

Hmmm... I wrote a tool back in the day that generated mesh strips for each guide spline for hair. I wrote it because I could get better hair simulation with cloth, and then use those strips to drive the guides movement. I'm not sure if it was generating UV's, but I could check.

poopipe

Use the Sweep and uvwXform modifiers 

musashidan

You could also use a Loft object. It has the bonus of built-in procedural twist/taper features.

And the best way of all to do this in Max is with the Ornatrix plugin......although it isn't cheap.

Ruflse

Thanks for the sugestions everyone, but after a lot of searching and testing I've concluded I'll have to keep doing hair cards in another program I find it sad that for most softwares you have to dig through hell to find something so simple in theory that would make placing them a lot easier, since neither Blender, Maya or Max really have a solution without the use of plugins or scripts.

musashidan

We just gave you several: loft or Sweep modifier. Blender also has a very similar workflow out of the box. Maya the same.

thomasp

Create your hairstyle as Fibermesh in Zbrush, export as curves via OBJ, import into Max (lines option needs to be checked in the import as I recall). Use the 3rd party 'Optimize_2' (sp?) modifier (from Scriptspot) on the resulting spline-cage to reduce the amount of CVs. Then set your splines to renderable in viewport with UV generation turned on, choose the most suitable shape for them, put a UV unwrap in the stack and mask all the sides you don't want, put an Editable Poly on top and delete that selection. I think that's how I did it. Feels like an eternity away now. Much better workflow to be had elsewhere of course. Stable, too.

Ruflse

I know this thread is a couple of days old, but after a lot of fiddling around I found what I think is the best solution for what I was trying to do and it may help someone:



What I did was to constraint a plane to a beizer spline as a lot of people do, but instead of modifying it using Edit Poly (which breaks the UV if you try to change the resolution of the plane afterwards) I used a couple of modifiers and a UVW XForm that places the UV where the hair texture will go. This way you can resample the planes without losing your UV that let you previsualice how the hair will look and still twist, bend or rotate the plane.
Sadly there isn't an option to stretch the plane to the limits of the curve so you have to constantly change the Stretch parameter in Path Deform, which is a bit annoying, but I think is workable.
It's a pretty simple solution but I haven't found it anywhere, and I think being able to change the resolution of the hair planes on the go is really useful, so hope it helps someone.

poopipe

if you used a sweep or a loft as suggested above you wouldn't have that downside