Creating and Applying Hair Decals
Step 1.
Familiarize yourself with the application. This will greatly improve your ability to create good looking hair and fur.
Though the Hairbrush tool is fairly intuitive, it does take some practice to learn what makes good parts in hair within AM.
The Images to the right show the application interface and some paint strokes and what they look like.
The "Default" Mode is probably the easiest to master. Paint in a direction and the appropriate color is applied throughout the stroke based on the initial mousedown location and the current position (Point A and Point B)
The "Constant" Mode does what it says. It constantly updates the color of the brush based on the current direction. This is useful for certain effects. Crop circles for example.
The "Random Green" function toggles to randomly change the green color channel to one of 256 shades. This effectively tweaks the horizontal direction of the hair an additional 256 levels from its current degree of rotation, but only within that degree. This gives you roughly 65000 increments to aim the hair with.
Making green random creates a more natural random type fur than leaving it at the default 128.
Toggle the tooltip button for interface help.
Step 2.
Here is an example map with a simple part down the middle of the hair.
Step 3.
In Animation Master I've created a sphere and grouped half of the points together. These are the points I will apply my hair to.
Step 4.
Next, create a new material. Then change its attribute type to Particle System/Hair.
Step 5.
Give the hair whatever properties you wish, but it should probably be fairly stiff in order to keep from laying to much. This will allow the directional map to work better.
I generally toggle the geometry on as well, but its not a necessary step.
Step 6.
Drag the material onto your group. This creates a mop of hair on the sphere. A very "Even" mop of hair.
We can do better.
Step 7.
Take the decal you painted and apply it to the same group of points you applied the hair to. Hide the points your not working with before you do this.
MAKE SURE THE DECAL COVERS THE ENTIRE GROUP. EDIT IT WITH THE UV EDITOR IF YOU HAVE TO.
If the decal hits patches that dont have hair or doesn't hit all the patches that do it wont work.
Step 8.
Change the image type to Other.
Step 9.
This creates a new menu item called "Properties Driven".
Right Mouse Click (Cmd click on the Mac) and select Add Property.
Step 10.
Now that you have a property for this image. Select the pulldown menu and select Direction.
This turns the original image which was a color image to a directional map for the hair.
Notice all the other things you can control with these properties. You can apply as many images as you wish to this decal and give each one of them a different property.
I usually just use the Direction, Diffuse Color, Thickness and length maps. Kinkiness and kink scale will only work if you left the hairs geometry turned off.
Now that's more natural looking hair. Looks like one of the Beatles.
Step 11.
Lets add a diffuse color map to see exactly what the hair direction map did.
Add a new image to the decal.
Change it to property driven and give it the diffuse color property.
If you have problems doing this read the steps above.
Now you can see a little clearer exactly what the direction map did. We probably need to crank the stiffness up a little more. I usually have to tweak my hair all over again once the maps are applied.
Here is a final render. Reminds me of the Wig that Darryl Hanna wear in Blade Runner.
Example 1.
Here is an example of a Tamarin monkey. I just created 3 maps for the hair. Probably could have used some forces to blow the tuft back, but I like the fur on the face.
Example 2.
Here are some different maps applied to the exact same model. Hair makes a world of difference when you're judging the differences in a creatures appearance.
cfree68@earthlink.net
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