Hey there! So I am pretty excited to work with Ornatrix in Maya and impliment it into our work flow here at work. I am currently working on making feathers and I had a few questions about them since I cant seem to find much documentation about this anywhere in regards to some of the questions I have. So here it goes, hopefully someone can help me with some of them. Firstly When I Select faces on my object and click on the Add Hair from selection it creates a single plane that is at the center point and does not generate anything else. If I just select the whole object and press the button it generates feathers everywhere on the object. This seems to work in the Max version. Is it broken in the Maya version? I could easily make a "scalp" object as a work around if I need to. Thanks. |
| Hi Adam, Great to see you giving Ornatrix Maya a try! I just tried the steps you mentioned and I do get the correct behavior with planting Ornatrix grooms on selected faces. Which build are you using? We fixed this problem recently so maybe an update to latest build released today could solve the problem? Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.) |
| Marsel, Thank you for fixing it! It works now. I cant wait to work on it this weekend and get amazing results with yhour product. |
| Great! Please keep me posted Adam. Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.) |
| So Im moving along quite a bit with the results of these feathers but I had a few more questions still. The results I am getting are great. However I want to take the process even further. 
So for what I have done here so far is created flat planes from the add feather tool and then once the size of the planes was what I wanted I selected the whole set of feathers and edit UVs and adjust them to fit my Alpha planes that I have painted. Mind you I am creating this for a game asset. and having so many faces is not reasonable for what Im doing. Which brings me to my questions. Without clicking on Add hair selection tool Is there away to create multiple random selections inside the hair systel so that I can use two textures with the one hair system to add maybe a second colored feather to give it even more randomness and realism? I would most likely select the whole scalp I created the system on and create an entire new hair system and I feel like that would potentially give you feathers on top of feathers which would not be desired. My next question is in your Max videos you used the system you created to project onto the asset you were using (the Bat Tutorial). However you had made meshes of the hairs so they were solid objects. With Feathers I tried using the Bake option with the alpha cards so that I could project a row of feathers onto an even larger card. And then when that didnt work I tried Baking the feathers onto the character as well using the envelope and the results were not good at all. Is there any way your team would recommend using these cards that I have created to apply them to a game asset similar to the bat tutorial? If we can figure this out I will be able to use the results on our latest asset which we can display results on our dev blog giving credit to the ornatrix system and its use in maya which I would be pretty exited about. |
| Hi Adam, Looking great so far! I suppose with your first question you are referring to the ability to output more than one texture channel for the feathers? This is how it's done in 3dsmax: you can output one channel with one type of coordinates and another channel with another type. Also on 3dsmax you can set face material ids to apply different materials to different feathers. I don't know the equivalent of this on Maya, but I will research this. With the second question are you referring to rendering to texture as in here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqrkEqY1EUs If so, how did you try it on Maya? We concluded that using something like Turtle is the only way to do it. I am excited to hear that you are close to getting the result you want and will try to make sure we get you there :) Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.) |
| Yes that the tutorial that I was using. I would gladly make a tutorial on my process when Im done if that would help you guys and anyone else if I am able to figure this out. I think this plugin is extremely powerful and can be very useful to many people who are attempting to make realistic feather textures on their characters. In Maya the process I attempted was to create my Low res plane that went around the Main of feathers that I would project all my detail onto. I unwrapped the UVs and then went into the baking options. In the Rendering Menues Lighting/Shading>Transfer Maps. I then selected normal displacement diffused alpha and used PSD as my file type so I could clean up with PS. For Target Mesh I selected the Plane I had created and for the Source meshes I selected the Feather system. I tried adjusting the search envelope to get better results but this didnt help either. |
| Hmm, so if I understand correctly you generate two sets of hair from the same roots: First are the base planes onto which you project the textures. Second are the dense feather hairs which you project on the first base planes. Doesn't this mean, however, that you need to have unique UVs for each of the base planes? Or maybe I didn't understand correctly? Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.) |
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So here is an image of my process. I dont think I was explaining it clearly, my apologies. First you can see the two objects in my scene 1 the Low Res planes which I have shaped around the featehrs and prepped for baking. And 2 feather system that I have created with ornatrix. The second shot is the settings of my envelope and the maps that I am baking. The last is the results that I got. I tried applying the alpha in photoshop but still did not work propperly. Is this more clear? I may be going about this all wrong. I was hoping that it would bake the information from inside of the envelope down onto the plane so I could remove the feathers and just use the plane. I understand its a bit crude but I am just using this as a test currently. |
| I understand now, thank you for the explanation. So it looks like the actual baking process is not working properly. Is it possible that the envelope is too small? Or maybe the normals of the feather geometry are facing the wrong way (looking aray from the plane) and thus the feathers are not rendered because they're being occluded? Flipping the normals could help in that case. Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.) |
| P.S. Do you mind if I post the feather image on our user group? It is looks pretty good :) Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.) |
| So I talked to the guys at work and they are cool with you showing off the work, as long as you're ok giving them credit and mentioning us with a link to our site. Forged Chaos. And the game is Exile: trials of Ascension. http://trialsofascension.com/ So I flipped the normals and got somewhat of a better result but I think the problem is that the planes all have alphas that the alpha map is generating all together . So in spots where just one feather is there its fine but if overlapping planes exist its not working properly. Im not sure how to reslove this. |
| Have you thought of using the Render Settings operator to actually make the billboard hairs look like feathers? You should still be able to apply the same texture map to them as the UVs adjust to the shape. You would need to match the shape in the render thickness curve to the texture manually though. Marsel Khadiyev (Software Developer, EPHERE Inc.) |
