FX Cloth And Hair Notes
FX Cloth Hair: Overview
For most students it’s not important to include hair effects fur or cloth in animation. One of the biggest areas is hair and it’s worth avoiding until students have already fully completed a character rigged animated and composited.
For the first character here’s a board with sculpted hair that can be rigged easily…
http://www.pinterest.com/andrewsilke/modelledhair/
A lot of cloth can be handled in the same way, modelled and animated, rigged like any other object. I don’t allow students to use other tools on a first character.
Using real hair or cloth is doable today… but it’s a huge time sink and students already have too much to worry about without adding cloth or fur or hair into the equation.
Fire in Maya
Creative Development: Realistic Fire and Sparks in Maya with Pankaj Malik
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=874 (1 hr 40mins)
Cloth in Maya
Modelling Cloth drawing guide…
http://pinterest.com/pin/326722147937128599/
Sculpting Cloth 2 hr Tutorial
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/59817273
nCloth Techniques for Characters in Maya (1 hr 16)
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=856&autoplay=1
Hair and Fur
Fur
Shave And Haircut
Shave and haircut is a plugin for fur. It’s being superseded by Yeti. Shave and Haircut filed a lawsuit against Yeti for copying patents. This means you cannot use Yeti in America. Luckily we are not in America. 🙂 I will be encouraging students to use Yeti.
Free overview tutorial using shave and haircut, renders took 15 hrs per frame.
http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/maya/tigerzoo/index4.html
Superman Shave and Haircut ZBrush Workflow Video
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/56508711
A Nice tutorial with some good tips for creating guide curves by painting geometry onto a surface and then turning the edge loops into curves.
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/70581861
Shave and Haircut on Digital Tutors
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=2539
Yeti Fur
Yeti has the reputation for being the latest and greatest fur plugin for maya. Fin design are using it and it looks great they say it has excellent support and ties in well with renders like VRay. They recomend it over Shave and Haircut.
Examples of Yeti Fur
http://vimeo.com/45560701#
http://vimeo.com/55024078#
You can apply for a free student licence at Peregrine Labs website here http://peregrinelabs.com/
YetiCentral.com for support and tutorials, this is quite a new website.
Using XGen in Maya For Hair (Autodesk)
[iframely]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xzAsTAJ5uY
XGen Webinar
[iframely]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEzh6qbS3As
Ornatrix
Ornatrix is another fur plugin which has some promise. Right now I don’t have much detail but looks like it was used with maya on this ad here…
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/58538984
Though it may have been rendered in Max, the info on the website looks like max. Here’s another demo using it…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0GJLR2WHo8c
Tips for Fur
1. Keep renders to 15 mins max. Anymore and it’s getting unworkable for animation. This might be a big limitation but you’ll have to work with it.
2. The key to fur is a well groomed set of guide curves. There’s many ways to make guide curve. Sometimes it might be best to make the guide cuves individually. take care to get the guide curves in the right areas and style, think of it like modeling a good object.
ZBrush: Digital Tutors paid tutorial on how to use Fiber Mesh to comb the hair on a mustache.
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?vid=17303
Mudbox guide curve tutorial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5L50ETOhc4
3. Split apart your fur pieces
There’s no reason to have just one fur piece. Divide your fur up into sections so it can be groomed and settings can be applied individually. Perhaps the top section is more mangey and the lower is softer and a lighter color etc.
4. Paint the surface of your character below the fur the same color as the fur, maybe ever texture a little so if the fur balds out then you don’t see grey!
5. Try to render out the fur in a separate pass so it’s much easier to comp in with individual layered effects.
Mesh Caching
Sometimes if you’re animating in one program and rendering in another it’s handy to mesh cache the mesh’s out. It’s sort of like an mesh witha blendshape animation every frame.
Alembic has been recommended for this process between a package like maya and cinema 4d. Good to know.
http://www.alembic.io/
XGen Hair
[iframely]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqAfWqU
GMH 2
[iframely]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHXnOX29DJg
GMH2 Tutorials and download
http://www.thundercloud-studio.com/main.php?page=gallery.php&Dir=tutorial/GMH/1/
GMH2 ZBrush Create Hair
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/88618744
Arnold Rendered in MR using pHair_TK
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/36682584
ZBrush Hair Brush Download Page (as seen in tute above)
http://www.jonathannasconeart.com/#!portraits/c14cx
MARVELLOUS DESIGNER
Marvelous designer looks like it’s becoming a power in cloth creation and simulation. It requires the cloth to be created relistically with actual patterns so it’s not necessarily easy to reproduce but the results look great
http://www.marvelousdesigner.com/
Tests by Dryulya
(sims are in Marvellous designer and fixes in houdini)
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/95895983
and
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/79707263
and
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/97203867
Matte Painting Projection
http://www.glyphfx.com/purchase.html
Custom Hair Clump Painting
[iframely]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL_BkK6bJr0
Bi Frost Fluid Information
https://www.youtube.com/user/MayaHowTos/videos
Daryl Obert did a quick thing on bi frost and the bi frost shader
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/daryl/maya-mondays—bifrost-shader
and Igor Zanic has put out a ton of info :
http://www.igorfx.com/bifrost/
XGen hair and fur 50 min webinar
[iframely]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEzh6qbS3As
FX Explosion in Max and Maya
[iframely]http://www.vimeo.com/105427942
Instructor
Andrew Silke