Decent hair tools for 3dsmax?
ngon master
So after pouring over the Samaritan documentation, and seeing that they used Hair-Farm to generate splines for his hair, and then used some shader wizardry (ffffffucking wizards!!! >;E ) to make those splines turn into flat planes when the camera hits them. i decided to have a crack at it!
Hair-Farm is fantastic. it's a great plugin, it's easy to use and very fast... it puts max hair+fur to shame, it really does. but i cannot afford the $695 it costs for full functionality (the demo doesn't let you save a scene, or convert to splines etc).
so my question is this:
is there a reasonably priced alternative available anywhere? are there any decent scripts people could reccomend to make hair+fur a more enjoyable tool to use?
thank you for your time!
Hair-Farm is fantastic. it's a great plugin, it's easy to use and very fast... it puts max hair+fur to shame, it really does. but i cannot afford the $695 it costs for full functionality (the demo doesn't let you save a scene, or convert to splines etc).
so my question is this:
is there a reasonably priced alternative available anywhere? are there any decent scripts people could reccomend to make hair+fur a more enjoyable tool to use?
thank you for your time!
Replies
does anybody know of a decent script, for automatically resorting alpha planes based on their position around an object?
for example, make a sphere, and it sorts the alpha planes in order of closest to farthest around that sphere?
i've gotten used to hair + fur now (it's a headache to begin with, though). but i can't seem to turn the splines into flat planes as they do for samaritan. maybe that's one of the special things hair-farm does.
other than that, it's just z-sorting alpha planes is currently just a headache. would be nice to automate the process somewhat.
from reading their PDF it seems more like they are using the guide splines that the hair solution produces to align a number of textured polygons to, so that would probably be the interesting bit - which tool in max can be used to ensure these poly strips end up with a nice orientation and are not floating above or sticking half in the head geo?
It's kind of similar to what you're after I think.
The UDN page mentions HairFX, which I guess is called Hairtrix now. Also costs $700 or so.
Max has a built-in hair solution too. But I have no clue if that one can make alpha strips. Edit: Guess it can if you set the Instanced Node to some object.
well here they're not even creating a haircut unlike the examples from the epic PDF. you could paint (or photo-source) those hair-cards in a few minutes by hand, btw. - skipping the hair plugin alltogether.
if you have to place the cards by hand however then having access to a fancy hair plugin seems irrelevant to me. 16000 triangles as mentioned in the PDF is a ton to work with manually, fun and quick results have to be found elsewhere.
it seems at the moment, hair-farm is:
good, fast. but not cheap.
hair + fur is:
fast, cheap (comes with max), but not that good.
manual hair cards is:
good, cheap, but definitely not fast. (it also doesn't do what i'm looking for).
i just find it really surprising that there's literally 1 good hair plugin for max, and that's it.
Maybe I missed something, but I thought they did paint those cards by hand, didn't they?
The thing they used the plugin for is to place the cards for them. You can set it to use other objects as the hair itself, and then use it to automatically place tons of cards for you. Hence why they showed 16k cards. I doubt someone placed that many manually. Same goes for the hair example from UDN.
style hair with hair-farm
convert hair to splines.
convert splines to very thin planes.
use a vertex shader to move the verticies apart when the camera looks at them (creating alpha cards).
apply alpha texture to planes.
Or for that matter, if we're going off of the UDN method, I believe you can do that as well.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/advanced-painter
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/line-per-vertex
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/pin-tool
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/move-to-surface
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/clavertech-aligntosurface
I however agree, what can't you do it with the built in tools for Max? Is there a reason?
i can't find a way of converting splines to planes. i can convert them to cuboids or cylinder...oids. but not single sided flat planes.
just grab some random hair brushes, paint, then xport to TGA.
pretty good results once you know what you're doing.
What is that?
actually, you can. from the hair farm vids it just seems the styling tools actually make sense as opposed to the combing stuff. but i guess by isolating parts of the scalp and using a mix of combing and manual spline editing you can do decent stuff with it.
cheers for the tip with the instance node, it's indeed pretty simple to create a hairplane and have it deform along the splines of the hair&fur modifier. that might be useful for stuff besides hair.
here is one for xsi i am basing mine on.
http://vimeo.com/7392263
once it is done it will be part of my character toolset for maya, but like i said this doesn't help max users out. back when i used max around version 8 or 9 i used a plugin called pluck to generate hair planes.