Hair System.

[amadlover]

Hey Guys,

I am doing a standalone hair system, which has tools for creating, combing cutting hair.

Firstly the maya scene is exported out to a custom cache scene format, which read by the hair application.

There are controls for density, sizing, segments of the hair follicles.

The one thing which is really cool / hot is the interactive shader previewer. This allows the user to see their shading results on the viewport itself, without having to wait to go through the rendering process.

Also it calculates self shadowing, based on a fast approximation of the Deep Shadow techniques.

Current state of the output can be seen in the images attached, one with no self shadowing and the other one with self shadows calculated.

Current development: physics / dynamic tools using bullet and the hair editing tools.

Later, would be exporting the viewport shaders to the most popular production rendering engines.

Would be more than happy to receive any help / guidelines / suggestions.

Thank you,
Nihal Kenkre.

[ganzou]

Sweet! very nice indeed. Now what exactly are you using bullet for? running dynamics on hair or what? Can you please elaborate on this since I'm also getting into bullet. What methods are you using for hair tube generation?

Very interesting standalone app...will it have an exporter or some sort of integration with maya. What is your intended end use for this app?

keep it up...very nice work!

[amadlover]

Hey,

Thanks :)

I would be using bullet for dynamics. creating ropes for the hair to collide with the rigid bodies.

If I understand the hair tube query, i am thinking collision offset might help simulate the "volume" a little.

Right now, I;ve just planned to export it to the mental ray hair primitive. and could/should be rendered like any other mi scene file.

Well, the focus of this to get as much render quality on the viewport as possible, to save the artist of going through the rendering process even to test a small setting change.

Thanks,
Nihal kenkre