Hair System

HAIR SYSTEM

Hair system is one of the main parts of FurryBall plugin. FurryBall hair system represents a brand new way to edit and render hair or fur. It is fully customizable and blazingly fast. All hairs are true geometry and fully shaded and they can be dynamic with the help of Maya Hairs.

Hair System

FurryBall hair system consists of three logical parts - Maya curves, guide curves (guides) and hair curves (hairs). Maya curves and guides is what you can see in Maya default viewport, hair curves can be seen only if rendered in FurryBall renderer. The system using guides and hairs is similar to many other hair renderers for Maya or other 3D software, here it is extended with Maya curves.

The three types of curves create a 3-level hierarchy of dependency, usually there is the smallest number of curves on the top level (Maya curves) and highest number of curves on the lowest level (hairs).

The pictures above show an example of simple hair system. Light green curves are Maya curves, guides are purple and hair curves are red in a FurryBall render. A curve always controls one or more curves from a lower level, if you bend it surrounding curves from lower level are bent as well according to their distance from the control curve. So why three levels and not just guides and rendered hairs? The answer is dynamics.

Maya curves - Maya curves are the only curves dynamics can be applied on directly. Maya curves use Maya dynamics, the dynamics is applied on all hairs indirectly using the 3-level hierarchy. Note that Maya curves are not placed on a per-vertex basis which means they do not depend on geometry complexity. Maya dynamics system is quite CPU demanding process and it is good to keep the number of Maya curves low.
Guide curves - Guides are meant to represent basic hair geometry, there is exactly one guide per vertex and its shape is derived from Maya curve according to the 3-level hierarchy. Number of control points per guide curve can be different from that of Maya curve but note there is usually no need to have Maya curve with more control points than guide curve has. The main purpose of guide curves is to comb the final hair.
Hair curves - These are the final hair curves visible in rendered image. Hair curves are placed uniformly on the surface between guide curves. Their shape is interpolated from guides so all modifications (deformation or dynamics) is applied to every hair curve indirectly using the 3-level hierarchy. Most of the hair node's attributes are related to hair curves, see Hair Node section for details about how to set every possible parameter for the hair.

To sum things up - Maya curves are for dynamics, guides are for combing and hair curves for final looks.

Create Static Hair

From the main FurryBall menu select Hair -> Create Hair to create hair systems for selected faces with default settings. Hair settings node will be created and assigned to it, in hair settings node you can adjust all hair parameters, see Hair Node section.

Create Dynamic Hair

FurryBall uses Maya hair for hair system dynamics. You can use existing Maya hair or create new one with these settings:

Select a mesh (or faces you want to grow FurryBall hair from) with Maya hair attached to it and select Hair -> Create Hair from the main FurryBall menu. Hair settings node will be created and assigned to it, in hair settings node you can adjust all hair parameters, see Hair Node section. If Maya hair is properly set FurryBall hair is dynamic.

Attaching hair to existing follicles

Hair system can be also attached to particular follicles. Create dynamic hair as described above, select it and select follicles, dynamic curves or mesh and select Hair -> Connect To Follicles from the main FurryBall menu.

Selecting hair node

Hair system has its own bounding box so just click on it and there will be a tab with the hair node in Attribute Editor, select it.

Assigning hair node to multiple hair systems

Hair settings node can control more than one hair system which is useful when more hair systems share settings and need to be controlled together as one. This is very similar to other settings node (eg. Material, Mesh, Light or Fluid settings nodes). Select a FurryBall hair system and from the main FurryBall menu select Hair -> Add Hair Attributes where is a list of available hair settings node. The existing attributes will connect to the selected hair system too.

For a tutorial on creating dynamic hair, see the Dynamic Hair tutorial.

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