Clothes and hair
 

Hi all,

rather than having actual Maya hair, can anyone suggest good techniques/tutorials for modeling hair (where render time is a consideration). I'm thinking it could be done with polygons and texturing but not sure how to go about it.

My second query regards cloth. Is it possible to make an item of clothing (t-shirt) from polygons, convert it to cloth, and then "freeze" its rest position so that it becomes static again, but maintains the appearance of relaxed material? Again thinking about rendering times. Obviously it won't look as good as dynamic cloth but better than sculpting creases/folds etc?

Thanks,

gubar.

Hey there Gubar,

You might find something useful here,

http://www.happymat27.co.uk/Hair%20a...ini%20site.swf

otherwise, there's loads of tutorials out there with various other sollutions.

Regarding the cloth query, once you are happy with how it's lying, you can just delete the history and it will no longer be dynamic (it's how I did the bed sheets in my hospital set).

Hope that helps a bit,

Mat.

Thanks for those matt - your site looks very helpfull

If your using 8.5/2008 I would recomend Ncloth as its a lot easier and faster than Classic cloth.

Hair takes up a lot of render time so you might be best off making it as poly planes and texturing form there using transparancy maps.

A technique I think I saw (or thought of!! it was a long time ago) was to make some paint FX hair then render from a orhtographic view (say the front) so you can see it) then save the image and its alpha, open it in PS and sepperate the colour form the alpha to get a colour map and a transparancy map and then apply the two to your plane.

Sounds like a good idea in theory gster, though I'm not too familiar with the ideas you suggest (alphas and paint fx - I know that alphas are for transparency though haven't used them yet.).

I'll gogle them and see what I see.

cheers,

gubar