Hair experimentation
 

I've been experimenting with hair today and here's what I got.
I'm really having trouble styling it, any hints?

Hair is a very difficult thing to work with. I use Shave and a Haircut. It's much easier to use, and (I find) much nicer looking.

One of the best ways to do it still to use transparency-mapped planes, and model them by hand. Like this: http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html

Hairs not too bad once you get your head round it, Shaves a great plug in and worth it if your doing a lot of hair work.

What method are you using to create the hair?

For long hair I generally create a nurbs surface based off a few lofted curves that creates the look of the hair, alomst modeling if you will. I then create curves off the surface, quite a number of curves that will become the hair.

I then assign a hair system via a sphere (so the hair already exists in the scene) to the curves. The method is based off an old tutorial that was availalbe on the net (might still be available)

The above allows control over the look of the haid as you can simply adjust the NURBS surface to control the hair.

I was just using maya hair and then using newton fields and collision spheres to try and get a good start point. I was following (what seems to be quite a poor) book.

I think modeling is the way to go for most uses but I would quite like to try a dynamic approach just to learn, so I will definitely try your method as well Gster123.
Thank you ;)

No Probs,

You can always make the curves dynamic after you've got it styled

Maya hair sucks plain and simple fur sucks too albeit a little less.
I think hair is great for creating a nice rope bridge, but when you actually want to use it for hair it's bollocks.

I personally think that alpha hair is still the best way to go.
I have seen some ellaborate ways to create hair including getting some paint fx hairs converting them to polys and then get them in ZBrush and work on them there but I found this way to lengthy and cumbersome.

I have seen the hair created by the joe alter plug inn which is pretty impressive, what i am finding strange is that a small company like joe alter or at least relatively small compared to autodesk is managing to make a piece of software that integrates (almost) seamless with Maya, while development of maya consists of bundling existing software and matching terminology and icons( equals annoying)to the other packages they have bought or are buying.
And Maya 2010 isn't supported yet so no reall use to me.

But to stay on topic:
I wouldn't use Maya hair for any production, it is to slow just fake it you get better results and as steve pointed out you can make stuf dynamic afterwards either through nucleus or joints which ever you choose.

Good luck
:beer: