Hey there guys, first of all I want to mention that I really have becone a fan of Ornatrix, reason is that it has been so richly developed, and Im looking foreward for a tool that hairfarm plugin has which is the tools to mesh model the hair and turn that model to hair. I have seen this ability in some in-house applications as well, one that dreamworks uses. So yeah, i guess with that ability ornatrix could become an unbeatable plugin. |
| Hello, We do have something similar, is called "Hair From Mesh Strips" This allows you to create hair from polygon planes or tubes. Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| Hi Jeordanis, yes Im aware that we have hair from mesh strips, and its very useful, only problem is that its a surface base hair generator, so it only generates hair on the surface of the model, it would be so much productive if it could generate hair in the volume of the model, same principle works in particle effects, for instance we can generate particles either on surface of a model or inside it, which fills the volume, hope i can make sense. |
| As far as I know HairFarm developers have a patent for this technology, but I guess it depends on how you generate the hair. Can you give me an idea of how those internal tools work? Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| Sure, so if you want to model something you create a sphere or a plane for instance and add an edit poly modifier and start to model. Also there is a modifier in hair farm which is pretty similar to edit mesh modifier in max (not similar to edit poly because edit poly has rich tools but edit mesh is more simpler), so for instance we can select our headcap model and add hair farm's edit mesh modifier to it and start to model the hair shape, when its done we can apply another modifier which turns the mesh model to a hair model, and hair generates from volume of the mesh not from the surface. |
| Thanks. I am aware of how HairFarm works but I don't think we can do exactly the same as them due to their patent. I am more interest to know how there in-house tools you mentioned work. For example, are they using locators like xGen? are they using the actual volume or just a central curve like Tonic from Disney? Jeordanis Figuereo (Product Designer. EPHERE Inc.) |
| Yes the one I have seen was for making Beowulf animation feature, they had their own hair plugin and it was using actual volume for generating hair. |