This month, VFXWorld continues a series of six excerpts of the Course Technology PTR book Maya Plugin Power, which will give VFXWorld readers to learn how to take advantage of the myriad of plugins available to Maya users.
I have never come across a better and easier way to create and styled hair and fur in Maya than Shave and a Haircut from Joe Alter. It works in a very intuitive way with a paradigm of Beauty Shop/Barber tools. A quick look at styling feathers on a bird.
Introduction
The computer graphics community has set their sights on many goals. One of them has been realistic flowing hair. The magnitude of generating and rendering thousands of hair strands was a problem that seemed insurmountable. Today, computer animation and vfx films are filled with golden locks, tufted fur and regal manes. Innovative solutions have popped up over the past five years that have almost put the issue of hair generation to rest. Autodesk's Maya Unlimited solution is Maya Fur. A far superior Maya plugin solution is called Shave and a Haircut. This single plugin with a funny name plays tongue-in-cheek homage to the musical couplet, of unknown origin, first used in the early twentieth century. It is being used by dozens of studios and vfx houses. Shave and a Haircut is full of features that overshadow the Maya Fur solution by leaps and bounds.
Tip: The short list of films using Shave and a Haircut is impressive. While many studios use Maya as their primary package, they bypass Maya Fur and use Joe Alter’s Shave and a Haircut plugin to elicit hair effects that suit their needs. Films such as 300, Barnyard, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Charlotte’s Web, Dr. Who, Dreamkeeper, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Exorcist: The Beginning, Hellboy, Into the West, King Kong, The Magic Roundabout, Moongirl, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Sin City, Space Chimps, Superman Returns, Ultraviolet, Underworld Evolution, When Animals Attack! and X2: X-Men United have visible uses of Shave and a Haircut in action.
Among its most powerful features are ease of use, exceptional rendering, and seemingly infinite flexibility. The feature set of Shave and a Haircut is impressive and integrates with Maya seamlessly in the following areas:
- Sculpting: Shave and a Haircut is an aptly-named plugin. The moniker is not a clever euphemism. It truly allows the user to feel that barbershop paradigm. Hair can be grown, shaped, cut and shaved. Its tight integration with Maya allows novel ways of texturing, shaping, and cutting hair. These tools are already familiar to you as a Maya user. Being a virtual barber is great fun.
- Rendering: The quality of the fur and hair rendering in Shave and a Haircut is incredibly photo-realistic. Shave and a Haircut uses its own renderer. Shave and a Haircut uses what's called Deep Accumulation for all shadows. Shadows are rendered first and displayed in the scene. The hair is then composited into the scene as a post process. Light penetrates within the hair mass to calculate more sophisticated and accurate shadows and self-shadowing than most other renderers do. There is little necessity for working around a situation. Maya functions, such as light properties and fog, work fine.
- Instancing: Shave and a Haircut has brought a great deal to the table with its package. While hair is its primary focus, it is capable of a few other neat tricks. Shave and a Haircut does not prevent your favorite renderer from being used. Hair generated in Shave and a Haircut is proprietary, but can also be converted to a mesh version object, so that any renderer could be used. Hair can also be substituted by other geometry. Instancing mesh objects can open up a world of new possibilities -- a field of sunflowers, a pumpkin patch, sheep or even pimples are all possible.
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