placing hair planes

Ruz

I have been doing a lot of hair stuff for various prjoects recently and have made some progress.
I figured that to get a decent looking hair do, you need quite a lot of planes and more than 1 shape of alpha mask, perhaps even 7 or 8 on 1 t page.

that's one aspect of it, but the main problem I am having is getting an easy way to place them on the head.

My first efforts have centered around splines and using patch deform to make poly planes follow them.
I suppose what missing in this approach is tapering them as I go along.

any suggestions for workflow here, its been driving me a bit mad and I know that hair is not the easiest thing to do anyway

I have tried converting the hair guides in max's own hair system, but this is not very intuitive really.

Mark Dygert

http://www.vigville.com/tutorials/hair/
I wrote this a while ago. It covers using splines as hair growth objects (instead of a skull cap), then copy/convert them over to planes and render out the hair that was created between the splines.

One thing I've changed up is how I go about laying down the splines. I paint them on the surface of the skull (actually a copy with the push modifier applied) using the spline painter script then push the verts nearest the skull into it. But you're not really looking to capture the hair/fur modifier so its probably not going to help that much...

What about using the same method to populate tree branches with leaf planes using particles?
http://www.andyzibits.com/tut_particle_tree_generation.html
or
http://www.game-artist.net/forums/support-tech-discussion/11251-trees-beginners-3ds-max-tutorial.html

Or what about using a object painter script to click place from a library of hair clumps?

But honestly I think you're better off manually placing it all like you're doing, it could be days getting any of those other methods I mentioned to work properly. The plus being if you do get them working it would make future jobs a snap, its just that initial "head on keyboard" work to flesh out a method that is going to suck...

Ruz

yeah kind of matching the research I have been doing over the years.
I did try the object painter script a few years back and was getting somewhere, then I left the company I was working for and didn't go back to it.
have n't tried the particle approach yet. looks interesting

I have tried using splines as the hair placement and converting the guides. works ok, but its hard to control and is not very intuitive

I feel that it will always be a bit of a bodge job unless someone really clever builds a hair plane painting system. that would be great

cheers for the links though Vig, will go through them carefully tonight.

I will also try and [ost some images for my WIP when and if I get somewhere:)

Jeremy Wright

I'd like to see how you tackle this, Ruz. I need to to this for a character and am totally stumped on where to start.

Marine

can you extude along a spline in max? that's how i do it in maya since it gives you control over twist and taper too

Ruz

seems to work ok Marine. I can take a poly or a tri and then in the edit poly sub object menu, you can extrude along a spline.
It doesn't stay live , but its not a bad solution for blocking out planes in max

edit: might be actually easier to loft the splines lofts seems quite powerful and I have ignored for the last ten years:)
you can scale twist and taper interactively

8FtSpider - its relatively easy to block out some hair planes, its when you have fancy hairstyles with lots of planes where it gets complex.
I wil try and do a little WIP thread or something when I get some decent results

Edit The loft technique works pretty well. very controllable overall.
here is my WIP