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Is this a Hag or not! After seeing some posts about this subject on Highend list, I decided to write a very short tutorial about the most important things Duncan pointed out about using PFX for hair. I picked up the female nurbs head created by Jeffrey Wilson on the Design community website at A|W. Don't kill me cause the image looks bad, I've put this tutorial together in less then an hour including this html page and the images. Here's the workflow I used. Fisrt select the nurbs patches you want to create hair on. Make them paintable by going into PFX > make paintable



Now create some Guide hair "curves" by using the ep curvetool, or whatever method you desire. Just make sure that the first cv is ON the head surface. Make as many as you like, just don't over do it... ;)



Next pick the Blond hair no shape brush from the Visor, and paint some strands of hair around the guide hair curves. After painting all the hair you want on the head, select all the strokes and do a pfx > share brush. This way you only have to modify the settings on one brush stroke to update all of them. Select a brush stroke and enter the attribute editor. Find the tab forces and change the following settings.

Momentum = 0
Lenghthflex = 1
Gravity = 0
Curvefollow = 1




These are the most important things to change to make sure the hair will follow the guide hair curves. Next you'll tell the brush strokes to use the curves as guides.



Select some of the strokes around a curve and select the closest guide curve. Then set pfx > Curve Utilities > Set Stroke Control Curves The stroke will take the shape of the selected guide hair curve. You can continue doing the same for all the strands of hair, or you could do all of em et once. If you want to do all of them at once, select all the stroke.. then select all the guide hair curves... then set pfx > Curve Utilities > Set Stroke Control Curves. Do tweak which stroke uses what guide hair curve tweak Curve Attract and Curve max Distance in the forces tab of the stroke. To see how the hair looks, increase the display quality of the brush stroke.

Next you'll want to tweak the look of the hair. I think most of us have problems with shadows. Sometimes the shadow looks dotted, and other times it does not. Why is this? Duncans answer : I assume that castShadows is turned on for the hair strokes. For your shadow casting light, turn off middistance and autofocus, make the dmap bias large and increase your filter size to at least 2. If the shadows are still dotted you have to increase your dmap resolution or increase the tube with. When the hairs look to thick, increasing the transparency also help on making the hairs look softer. Finally decreasing the contrast of the hair color and lowering the specular power and color also helps on making the hair less hard.



Here's what I got so far. Note that the shadows look ok now. The only thing is that there's not enough hair. This is easy.. just increase the number of tubes for the strokes.



This should get you a good start, if you have questions for me, mail me at peter@corvidae.net I'll handle dynamics later.

If you're looking for a very good hairsystems, I suggest you check out the following three options.

1) Joe Alter's Shave and a Haircut, his upcomming extreme version supports Renderman (and BMRT if larry implements the riCurveprimitive in BMRT)

2) Steamboat Software's JIG renderer (used in Stuart Little for a couple of shots of Snowbell the Cat)

3) Worley labs Sasquatch Although Shave and sasquatch are currently available only for lightwave , you can use these products by using the Beaver to in and export data to and from lightwave and maya. This way you can use lightwave's renderer to render maya scenes.