• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Tip Fade option causes the hair to be more transparent toward the tip. The Specular Tint color changes the color of specular highlights. The Tip Fade and Specular Tint options apply only to hairs rendered with mental ray. The Self Shadow value sets how much the individual hairs cast shadows on other hairs, and the Geometry Shadow settings determine how much shadow is contributed by other geometry objects. The Geometry Material ID is used to assign a material to geometry-rendered hair.

Many of the properties in the Material Parameters rollout also can be controlled using map buttons located to the right.

FIGURE 29.3

Many of the hair properties can be defined using maps.

Caution

Map colors are multiplied with the base color value, so set the base color to white before using a map. •

In addition to the general and material parameters, rollouts also are available for controlling the amount of Frizz and Kink, and for the Multi-Strand nature of hair. Frizz causes the hair to curl at its tip or root. Kink parameters cause the hair to be zigzagged in shape; the Multi-Strand parameters cause hair to separate into groups like grass does. Figure 29.4 shows four areas with different hair properties applied, including normal straight hair with no frizz or kink, a section with Frizz, one with Kink, and Multi-Strand.

FIGURE 29.4

Changing hair properties can drastically alter the hair's look from normal to frizz, kink, and multi-strand.

Tutorial: Adding a spline fringe to a quilt

Quilts are designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, and what could be fuzzier than some soft fringe surrounding a quilt? Fringe makes grabbing the quilt easy.

To add hairy fringe to a quilt using splines, follow these steps:

1. Open the Patch quilt.max file from the Chap 29 directory on the CD.

2. Select the Create⇒Shapes⇒Line menu command, and draw a couple of simple splines that extend at right angles from every corner of the quilt in the Top view. These splines will be used to designate the start and end splines for the quilt fringe. Hair strands will be placed between these two simple splines. Start at one corner, and proceed in turn clockwise around each of the corners. Add a second line on top of the first line to complete the set of splines.

3. Select the first spline, and convert it to an Editable Spline object using the right-click quadmenu. Then click the Attach button, and select the splines in the order they were created.

4. With all the splines selected, choose the Modifiers⇒Hair and Fur⇒Hair and Fur WSM menu command to apply the Hair and Fur modifier to the splines.

5. Open the Modify panel, and in the General Parameters rollout, set the Hair Count to 2500, the Random Scale value to 10, and the Tip and Root Thickness to 5.0. Then open the Material Parameters rollout, and change the Tip and Root colors to white.

Figure 29.5 shows the resulting quilt with its fringe, all warm and fuzzy.

FIGURE 29.5

Hair or fringe can be added to a subobject selection or to the entire object.

Styling Hair

The Display rollout (located way at the bottom of the rollouts) includes settings for controlling how many hairs are displayed in the viewports. To see all the hairs, you need to render the scene. You can select to display Guide Hairs and actual hairs and set a color for each. The Override option causes the color specified in the color swatch to be used instead of the render color. You also can select a Percentage value of the total hairs to display in the viewport up to the number in the Max Hairs value. Enabling the As Geometry option causes the hairs to appear as geometry objects instead of lines.

Guide hairs control the position of all adjacent hairs. Guide hairs extend from each vertex in the attached object. Guide hairs are yellow by default, and viewport hairs are red, but you can change the color for each in the Display rollout.

Guide hairs provide a simple way to style, comb, and brush hair. By positioning the guide hairs, you can control what