One of the reasons I purchased Ornatrix for Cinema 4D was with the ambition I could create complex hair styles quickly from mesh-based hair models that were originally designed for alpha based materials.  These models are typically made up of many polygon strips.

I’ve come up with a workflow that almost gets me there, but my latest challenge has been to keeping the hair properly grounded when the character is moving. My posting a couple of days ago is on that subject.

I haven’t got any replies on that posting yet so I thought that maybe taking it one set further by converting mesh-strips to hair, then hair to guides, then back to hair again would do the trick. That resulted in new issues.

Let me first outline my workflow of converting the hair card model to mesh-strip hair:

1. I break apart the single hair model object into multiple objects. A lot of these models already have multiple selection tags so the process is easy.
2. I make sure I keep the material UV tag in place as this reduce the hir direction headache later.
3. In this project, I broke the hair model into 11 objects. Each of these objects still have multiple polygon strips.
4. I validate all the UV tags have the polygons going from top to bottom.
5. Right now, I’m using the “head cap” for grounding.
6. I move the individual hair card objects so only the root end of hair intersect with the head cap.
7. I add the Ornatrix object, insert the Mesh-strips-to-Hair modifier and add the 11 objects.
8. I set each mesh object to only have 5 hairs per stip. Because there’s so many hair cards it equals a lot of hair.
9. Since the material UV tags have correct orientation, I only need to set the direction based on the UV material tag and all hairs point the correct direction.
10. I add the Change Hair Width modifier and Ground modifier.
11. Finally, I add a Redshift hair material and “Bam” it renders with a hair style that follows the original mesh-based hair model just like I wanted!

But as my previous posting, the hair doesn’t always move with the hair cap when it’s moved. I would rather ground to actual character’s head but grounding has even more problems. I don’t know if it’s because the full character has less polygons than the head cap or if the grounding is getting confused with the hair touching the shoulders and the back of the character. I would think that since Ornatrix knows where the roots are based on the Mesh-strips-to-Hair modifier and setting the direction this won’t be an issue, but maybe it ignores this information. (BTW – I think Ornatrix needs some visualization tools to show how, and what, is being grounded)

So today I decided to try converting hair to guides and back to hair. I don’t know where to start on all the problems this caused. Guides floating in space, some hair thick, so areas no hair at all, and I can never get the hair to move with the grounded object.

Sorry for the long posting, but surly I’m not the first person to try to do this. I’ve even though of converting Ornatrix hair to splines and then using them for Cinema-4D’s hair object.  Any thoughts?

Bruce

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Attached Files:

Hair_Card_Capture_01.JPG (186287 bytes), Hair_Card_Capture_02.JPG (43328 bytes),