Upgrading To A New Shave Version
Just run the new installation it will clean up the old one as long as it's 2.1 or better MOVING A SHAVE LISCENSE Shave keys are tied to your NIC card, so you can definitely move your NIC card to a new machine to maintain the license. That said, it is a node locked license, and one of the reasons it is so cheap we don't charge for rendering , is that we expect you to license every workstation in your studio which may ever touch a scene that's got hair. We realize that's a big commitment, but...
Shave and a Haircut for Maya
1998-2003 Joseph Alter, inc Patent Pending Los Angeles, CA joealteriac hotmail.com http www.joealter.com www.egroups.com groups shaveman is the address of the user group Shave and a Haircut, it's comcepts and accompanying materials are the sole property of joseph alter, inc. End Users are entitled to the use of one 1 end user license of the software per software key. Although Joseph Alter, Inc. JAI makes best effort to answer user questions and incorporate bug fixes and upgrades, this is by no...
viewer basics some hotkeys
Although, admittedly, the shave interface doesn't conform to Maya's, it is quite easy to learn and very intuitive. To orbit - just hold down the LMB in the viewer area and move the mouse To drag things just hold down the RMB in the viewer area and move the mouse What the 'drag' will actually do gets modified by two things, one is the type of selection you have, the other is the type of transformation you've selected in the 'TOOLS' menu. You can also pan around with the arrows, and zoom with ','...
Model Preparation
In order for the instances to be properly scaled and fit to the hair, you should build your model with its base which will be positioned at each hair's root is at the origin 0,0,0 . The model should be 1 unit tall. Shave will then scale your model appropriately such that each instance is the length of the hair it has been applied to. If your model extends below the origin, than the part of it that's below y 0 will actually intersect the surface. Sometimes this is not a Bad Thing- if the hair is...
Bending the Twist
Once you're happy with the twist, we can bend the hair around using an IK chain. This is just an example any deformation you apply to the surface should work. In this case, I made a simple 5 segment skeleton, and did a smooth bind to the cylinders. After rotating a few of the segments around, my scene looks like this The shave Parameters can be set to your taste. I'm using 4000 I could use fewer if the thickness settings on my hair were higher. IN order to get smooth hairs around the curves,...
Importing
When importing a scene with Shave Hair, you must enable the 'Use Namespaces' checkbox in the Maya import panel. Skull objects are referenced by name, as are specific hair groups. If 'Use Namespaces' is not enabled, you will get unpredictable results. Scenes that are imported become part of your Resolve clashing nodes jJwlth the file name jrJ File Type Specific Options No Options Available File Type Specific Options No Options Available current scene any edits you make to the objects in the...
Create Hair By
Create Hair By has two submenus, Copy Params From, and Copy Hair From. Each of these submenus pull out to a list of all current shaveNodes. These menus allow you to either create new hair that inherits the attributes of an existing shaveNode, or 'transplant' the hair from an existing shaveNode. The difference between the two operations is that Copy Params From only copies the attributes the hair will still be grown in the default style. Copy Hair From on the other hand not only copies the...
Table of Contents
- Editing hair in the shave interface - Multiplying hairs clumpy stuff - Applying an Instance Model to a Hair Growth 7 Outputting hair to RIB files -mel command -shaveRibDump.exe
Iterative Texture Painting
In many cases, it is helpful to be able to see the results of texturing on the hair interactively, without rendering. For performance reasons, Shave does not update the textures on a per-brushstroke basis, but we have provided a tool to let you see the results of what you are doing reflected in the interface. I'll use another simple scene to illustrate this workflow. In this case, I'll be painting a cut map on a sphere. I built the scene by creating a sphere, and selecting the top group of...
creating things as polygons
By now, you've played around a bit with the shave buffer render. As you can see, it's pretty memory efficient about rendering things that have millions of elements. The reason for this, is the shave render only needs one hair in memory at a time, and just generates them on the fly as the rendering is being done. This can cause some limitations though, you may have reasons to want to just generate everything as polygons so you can render things in your native render. Maya, unfortunately, is a...
Live Mode
When Live Mode is enabled Maya will force scene updates whenever the cpu is idle. The result is that the hair will be 'live'- that is to say that it will fall with gravity and display other dynamic attributes as you move your object around. If you are in hair display mode, you will also be able to see the results of tweaks to the hair parameters. Unfortunately, there currently a Maya bug, and when you turn this feature off, it will fail to release the cpu. Whichever Maya process is remaining,...
Passes
Shave's buffer render has a fairly novel way to handle hair transparency. Instead of resolving actual hair transparency the hair is rendered multiple times as opaque hair with different random seeds. These buffers are then blended together. Depth sets the number of transparency passes. As you increase it, the transparency or whispyness of the hair increases. You will notice that with each step of increase, the actually number of rendered hairs increases as well though because of the additional...
Creating the Hair 1
In order to achieve the effect we are looking for, we need to create long hairs, running down the length of the cylinders To grow the hair, select the top row of faces of the cylinders, and select Shave- gt Create New Hair. This will create a default growth from the top row of faces on the cylinders. Once the hair has been created, we need to edit it in the Shave interface in lengthen it, comb it down the cylinders, and apply the surf lock. To do this, select the Shave- gt Edit Current- gt...
selection modes methods
You can grab hair in various ways. You can grab it by the 'ends', or you can select all the hair verts at once 'whole strand' . The type of selection you have can greatly select the effect that a tool has on the hair guides, since shave is constantly applying IK and constraints. You'll just have to play with those combinations to get a feel for it. To appreciate how important the selection type can be, we'll take a simple translate on a single hair. They both start out as a straight hair, and...
Run Dynamics
Run Dynamics will run your scene through the frame range and bake out the results of the dynamics calculations to a series of .stat files. Once you have run dynamics, shave no longer looks at the transforms on the growth object to determine the hair position- instead the cached data is read from the filesystem. If you change any of the dynamics attributes for a shaveNode, edit any hair with Edit Current- gt Style Hair, or tweak any of the animation attached to a growth object, you will need to...
A Note about mapping Stiffness
The stiffness parameter in the dynamics section of the shaveNode attribute editor works a little differently than the rest of the maps. Since dynamics are calculated based on guides instead of hairs, this is how textures are applied. This means that the most resolution you can get from a map on stiffness is one sample per guide. If you need fine localized control over this parameter, then you'll want to increase the density of your mesh in the critical regions.
Render Quality
The Shave Globals panel contains items that control global shave parameters. Items set here will affect all of the shaveNodes in the current scene. Gravity controls the force of gravity acting on the shave hair dynamics. The Render Quality pulldown controls the level of anti-aliasing applied to the shave buffer render. The available choices are Draft, Low, Medium, High, and Duuude. The Draft setting implies no anti-aliasing. High will be fine for most final renders, and in case of emergency,...
Shave Globals
This will launch the Shave Globals attribute editor. Please see the Shave Globals section for more information about what these parameters control. The Select menu contains two items which let you select specific items in the Maya scene. Create New Hair Create Hair By Edit Current HUD display Dynamics
Rendering with Maya
As an example, let's create a sea anemone The base of the anemone will be a deformed cylinder, and its arms will be stretched half-spheres instanced to hair. To start, I'll create the base. Mine looks like this Once the base is created, we can grow some hair off of it. Remember that the hair will be used to instance the tentacles of the anemone, so I don't want to grow hair off of the entire object. Instead, I will select only the faces around the top perimeter of the body, and then perform the...
Tile Count
Tile Count controls the number of tiles the render is broken into. The options are 1x1, 3x3, 5x5, 9x9. and 15x15. The default is 5x5. Rendering the scene in tiles dramatically reduces the memory demands of high resolution images. This benefit comes at the expense of a small overhead penalty. The overhead imposed by the tiling is very small compared to the penalty one pays for going into swap. Still, on machines with a lot of RAM, you might be able to save a little bit of render time by setting...
Tip Thickness Display As
This is where you control how you want shave to represent the hair in the maya interface. The default is guides, which will show you the guide hairs. This can be changed to 'hairs', or 'geometry'. The default level of detail set in the shave globals is fairly low, so you should have no problems displaying the other types. As you increase the level of detail the scene may become pretty heavy. Hair or Geometry will give you a better representation of what your hair is going to look like than the...
Growing hair and rendering
Shave for Maya recognizes 3 growth types 'splines', 'polys', and 'nurbs surfaces'. The spline type will grow hair between two or more maya splines interpolated , the polygonal and nurbs growth types will grow hair from geometry surfaces. You do not need to do anything special to tell shave which type of growth you are creating, it will look at the objects you have selected and do the right thing. For splines, you can minimally just draw several maya splines, select them, and hit 'Shave- gt...
A Procedural Example
Let's look at one more case of texturing. In this case, we're going to start with our original grassy field, and give it an infestation of bugs. We'll start with the same example we have used above. We will apply a procedural texture to the Density Map attribute, and a derivative of that same map to the Hair Color channel. We will create this map from scratch, so we'll start by clicking the add texture button next to Density Map. Again, this is the checkered button to the right of the text...
creating things as RI CURVES and RI POINTSPOLY
Many of you are in studios where you have plenty of PRman or compatible render nodes lying around, and would rather sacrifice some of the efficiency of shave's render for better integration. We currently offer two methods to enable you to accomplish this. The first method is a mel command called shaveWriteRib. The syntax for this command is shaveWriteRib string filename, float frame For example, 10 would create a rib file containing all of the hair in the scene, transformed for frame 10, called...
Lighting quickstart
Technically, shave's shadow method is a deep-shadow-accumulation buffer. If you've ever used a depth buffer on a spotlight, you're half way to understanding how to deal with shave lighting. Like a depth buffer, you're actually lighting with maps that are rendered from the light's perspective. This means if you were to look at your scene from the light source's perspective and the whole scene was only a couple pixels across, your lighting is going to look like turd, since there isn't enough...
Editing hair in the shave interface
The set of growth attributes has been incorporated into the shaveNode, so any changes you want to make to these parameters are made from inside maya. In order actually manipulate the guides style the hair , you will need to launch the shave interface. First, select the shaveNode you want to edit. If you only have one, there is nothing to do. If you have more than one, you want to go to the 'Shave- gt Set Current' menu and pick one of the nodes. Then, just hit 'Shave- gt Edit Current- gt Style...
Frizz Properties
The frizz displacement does just what it sounds like. It 'frizzes' the hair. This is accomplished by doing a Perlin noise lookup at the hairs rest position root, then displacing the hair much the way bump mapping displaces a surface normal. The frequency of the noise function is set by the Frizz XFrequency, Frizz Yfrequency, and Frizz Zfrequency parameters. The magnitude of the displacement is controlled with Root Frizz, and Tip Frizz. If your shaveNode is set to 'hair' or 'geometry' display...
Applying the Instance Object
Instances may be rendered by the Shave renderer, or by the Maya renderer. Which one you choose will depend on personal preference, and what sort of instancing you are doing. Shave's renderer is capable of rendering large numbers of instances without using large quantities of memory. This is because it uses a new class of polygons called 'metapolys'. This technology allows Shave to only retain a small segment of the dataset in memory at any given time the instances are created on demand and then...
How Textures are Handled
There are slightly different texturing requirements depending on whether you are going to be rendering with the shave renderer or using Mayas. In the case of a Shave render, the textures are sampled at the time that the instance object is applied. If there is a texture applied to the source object the texture will automatically be sampled. If there is no texture then the instances will render with the hair color you select in the attribute editor. For maya render texturing, Shave uses the...
Rendering Tips for the Buffer Render
Yes, ray tracing doesn't have these kinds of issues at all, does it Here's why, a ray tracer must have all scene information and geometry available to it at any given time, this is because rays are just bouncing all over the place particularly in the case of global illum . The penalties you pay for ray tracing are just extreme amounts of memory that get used, as well as cpu. The benefits are, all kinds of neat types of light sources, no faking reflections refractions. Blah, quite a few. Now...
Root Frizz
Root frizz controls the displacement of the hair at its root. You can see that the roots in the image on the right Root Frizz 150 are no longer orthogonal to the surface. Root Frizz 0 Root Frizz 150 Root Frizz 0 Root Frizz 150 Tip Frizz controls the frizz displacement at the tip of the hair. You can see in the images below that regardless of the Tip Frizz value, the roots still grow normal to the surface.
Creating the Hair
Now that the wig has been created, it's time to create the hair. Spline hair is created using exactly the same procedure you would use to grow hair off of any other primitive you select the growth object, and then perform a Shave- gt Create New Hair. In this case, the growth object is the set of curves we just created. Select all of the curves, and perform the Create. Mine looks like this Oops Something's not right you can see that the hair is accurately located at the tips, but the roots are...
Having difficulty with Dynamics and Render Farms
SYMPTOM the hair's just not moving with the surface at all CAUSE then you're probably pointed at the statfile from another scene and it is rejected because the vertex count is wrong. There will be tons of errors in your render log CURE make sure you use different stat directories for each scene CAUSE your using mental ray hair prims with 4.5 CURE we don't support that at all anymore because of that, and aren't recomending the hair prims in 5.0 with motion blur on SYMPTOM hair is moving, but...
Rendering with Shave
. As an example, let's build a forest. I'm going to grow my forest from the same grassy field example that we used in the texturing examples, so I'll load that up. I have scaled the hairs up in the Shave interface, my scene looks like this To turn our field into a forest, I'll start by creating a single tree. The tree has been built to conform to The Rules- that is to say that its base is at the origin, and it is one unit high. Trees don't bend much, so I don't need to be too concerned with the...
Multi Strand Properties
Some degree of clumping gets naturally created when you use frizz at low frequencies, but you can go a bit further here with 'Multi Strand Count'. What it does is, for each hair that would have normally been rendered, a clump of N hairs gets rendered -scattered around the original hair. Splay controls the amount of scatter at the roots and tips, and 'Multi Strand Count' controls the number of hairs to create for the clump. Splay can be used to shape the clump by spreading or compressing things...
Density and Cut maps
Density and cut maps work slightly differently than the rest of the parameters. This is because there is no value attached to these parameters- they are always 1. This means that they will always reflect the value of the map channel you've assigned. Let's run through another example, this time mapping density. For this example, I'm going to grow hair off of a plane or in this case, is it a plain Now, let's play a little practical joke on someone, and build ourselves a crop circle. To do this,...
Recomb
This is where 'recomb' comes in. Probably the most useful tool on the menus, recomb simply takes a hairs current direction as a hint and makes it parallel to the surface again. So here's a hint. Go into brush mode, then do whole strand select, and push hair around not worrying about skin penetration or hair shape. You're just trying to indicate the direction of the hair flow. Hit 'r' recomb frequently, and you will quick start to see hair flow smoothly wherever you want it to. Once you have...
Shaves Hair Attributes
If you look closely at hair, the color can vary significantly from strand to strand. There are several ways this can happen in nature. Firstly, there is almost always some variation in hue and value. Red hair isn't just red - it's a whole range of colors in the red family. Also there are frequently mutant hairs, usually white, that fleck the hair. As we get older, there are more of them until the head is totally white. There is also some variation from root to tip especially with a cheap dye...
Scale
This tool will scale selected hairs up or down depending on a left or right mouse drag. Some hairstyles lend themselves more naturally to spline interpolation than surface growth. In the following tutorial we will create a simple wig for 'Kate', and create a spline based hairdo. Spline based hair basically gives you discreet control over a finite set of guide hairs. When you create hair with spline objects as the growth sources, guides are created from each spline you have selected. In this...
Reset Rest Position
Reset Rest Position is very useful in conjunction with Live Mode. When this menu item is selected, the current hair position will be saved as the rest style for the hair. This is similar to entering the Shave interface, selecting 'test' mode, and then freezing the hair with lt esc gt . The Select menu contains two items which let you select specific items in the Maya scene. This item will select the current growth set. It is useful to be able to retrieve this selection, because once that is the...
Texturing Shave Attributes With Maya
Shave's texturing capabilities have been integrated to work with native Maya texture nodes. This means that you can use any maya shading network as a texture source. The Uvs used for mapping will be inherited from the growth surface, and the points on the surface will be used as a reference point set in the case that you are evaluating a solid texture. Shave uses textures to attenuate the original value of an attribute. This means that if you have set an attribute to a value of .5, and then...
Comb Camera
This is a good starting point for fur. Generally, before you begin fine tweaking, you want to get the comb right. This defines the flow of hair over a surface. Comb camera will selected hair away from the current viewpoint, while also keeping it bent parallel to the surface itself. Because of tangency the fact that the hair trys to remain parallel to the surface , the hair will go around lo-grade corners pretty well, but it will not likely be satisfactory for a realistic hair flow in itself.
Edit Thingys
These are operations you do to the workspace once only, they don't put you in modes. To turn collisions on in the shave interface, you need to have already added a collision object inside Maya. We allow you to turn them off here as well since they can be slow and get in your way when sculpting. If you are able to drag a hair through a collision activated surface, tap the right mouse button a couple times and it should correct itself. If you've sized some hairs down to nothing, you'll need to...