The Scale, Rotate, and Translate tools on the Transform panel also help you style the guide hairs.
Give me a head with hair—long beautiful hair. You can have it long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty ... you get the idea. Yes, in Softimage you can make all sorts of hairy and furry things—from Lady Godiva to rabbits, bears, and caterpillars. There are few limits to the possibilities.
Hair in Softimage is a fully integrated hair generator that interacts with elements of the scene’s environment, such as lighting, other objects, and natural forces. As a result, you can create shadows for hair, create collisions with objects, and apply dynamics and forces to make the hair move.
Hair comes with a set of styling tools that allow you to groom and style the hair, almost as easily as if it was on your head! You can control the styling hairs one at a time, or grab hundreds and style as you please.
To control the rendered look, you can use special hair shaders designed for hair, or you can use any other Softimage shader. And as with all things rendered in Softimage, you can use the render region to preview accurate results.
About Guide Hairs and Render Hairs
Hair is actually represented by two types of hairs: guide hairs and render hairs. Guide hairs are actually segmented curves that act like inverse kinematics (IK) chains and are used for styling, while render hairs are the “filler” hairs that are generated from and interpolated between the guide hairs. As their name implies, render hairs are the only hairs that are actually rendered.
• For information on styling guide hairs, see Styling and Animating Guide Hairs
• For information on setting render hair properties, see Creating Hair.
Hair is actually an assembly of different parts that work together: the hair generator, the hair object (geometry), the emitter object, the dynamics engine, and the hair shader.
• The hair emitter is the object from which the hair is emitted. This is any object that you select and apply hair to.
• The hair generator is the operator that generates the hair strands.
• The hair object is the actual object whose geometry is displayed as guide hairs. Styling operators you apply define the look of the guide hairs.
• By default, the Hair Renderer shader is a surface shader that is attached to hair to define the look of the render hairs. It lets you set the color on the hair strands, add transparency, self-shadowing, and optimize the rendering in different ways. You can also connect the Hair Geo shader to hair, as well as standard Softimage shaders.
• If you apply dynamics to the hair, the dynamics operator is the engine that calculates the movement of the hair according to the velocity of the emitter object and any natural forces applied to the hair object.
Finding Hair Elements in the Explorer
In the explorer, you can see the relationship among all the parts that make up hair.
Applying hair creates a hair primitive object (appropriately called Hair) and its hair generator for each element to which you applied hair. The hair object is a child of the hair emitter object, with its local transformation parameters muted.
You can make hair a part of a character, especially within the structure of a model, and then transform that character as you like; for example, branch-select and transform the emitter object and the hair strands stay with it. The hair object’s centre, however, stays at the global origin which matters for deformations.
The Hair toolbar is your one-stop shopping center for hair styling tools. The commands on the Hair toolbar let you create hair itself, then perform a myriad of styling tasks on guide hairs, such as lengthening and shortening, combing, clumping, cutting, and many others.
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The Scale, Rotate, and Translate tools on the Transform panel also help you style the guide hairs. |
When you create hair, the Hair property editor opens, allowing you to set viewing and render hair properties. See Creating Hair for more information.
To open the Hair property editor
• Select the hair object and press Enter.
or
• Click the Hair node’s icon in the explorer.
To make elements in the scene snap to guide hairs when styling, use the Hair filter in the Snap menu in the main command panel.
Selecting Objects with Dynamics
If you have many objects in a scene, it can be difficult to select only the objects in the simulation. With any of the Select filter options active, you can make sure that only simulation elements can be selected. This includes any object that has dynamics: particles, hair, rigid bodies, soft bodies, and cloth.
To use the selection filters
• In the Select panel of the main command panel, click the little arrow button and select Obj w Dynamics from the filter list.
• To select only rigid body constraint objects, select Dynamic Constraint from the filter list.
Autodesk Softimage v.7.5