hairfx workflow

[Adam H. Stewart]

Last shot with Hair & Fur WSM

I am giving it the last shot using the Hair and Fur WSM modifier. It seems at the moment to be giving better results. The producer has me warned to move on. There is a crazy deadline as always and I have been tearing my hair out with this grass thing. Ideally it would animate.
I downloaded the Druid plug-in and something else called AdvPainter 1.5 but am afraid to start messing around with something new this late in the game.
I'll let you know how my latest tests go.

Thanks for your help.

[DaForce]

Best of luck with all that

yay finally broke the 3000 post mark ...

[Da_elf]

grass-o-matic is druid grass. really good plugin like i was saying earlier

[mike.edel]

grass-o-matic is druid grass. really good plugin like i was saying earlier

i know
just wanted to make it easier to find it - it really is a shame that it hasn't been updated for max 6+

[Da_elf]

yeah. wonder why they stopped. i think they went out of business.

[mike.edel]

yep, seems so
www.sisyphus.com

SISYPHUS SOFTWARE NO LONGER PUBLISHES PLUG-INS

DNT will become the property of Arete shortly. They will likely continue to develop and upgrade it.

DNT meaning Digital Nature Tools

[Adam H. Stewart]

Latest Grass

http://h1.ripway.com/Adam_Stewart/Wht_AE1_C3_.jpg

http://h1.ripway.com/Adam_Stewart/Wht_AE1_C2_.jpg

These are pretty rough comps done by me. The finished thing looks alot better - you don't notice the matt lines half as much as the AD is using alot of heavy filters.

The sky is a photo - I think the grass and trees look pretty good but then again I've been staring at this for so long I have no idea if it looks like grass or candy floss

[jow]

looking good, what did you end doing for the grass?

[Adam H. Stewart]

Fur

I did the grass on these frames with furfx. There is no animation - the frames where flickering way to much because you are forced to use Hair shadows that are shadow maps. It suspect it was because the frames being large (1400x79 where running on the edge of ram for my farm.
I have never had much luck with Shadow maps.

There is another pass that is going to go into the final composite that was done with the Hair WSM modifier. It is much easier to animate with no flickering that I can see. The ideas is that the hair in a mulitple mode will lend just enough motion to the fur grass underneath to make it seem alive - that is the theory anyway.

Glad you like the work, I'll post some animations when I get a chance.

[DaForce]

Hey Adam, looking good man. Not a bad final result.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks

Thanks I'm pretty happy with it. Of course the contact shadows between the grass and the trees really gives the comp away but doing it all in one pass just wasn't working with my machines. I could probably have mixed the layers better but the deadline just crunched me too much.

Thanks again for all you're help.

[DaForce]

No problem mate, glad you got a satisfactory result.

Im sure one day we will get a proper grass solution.... cause there is definitly plent of call for it.

[Adam H. Stewart]

What do you know about hairtrix ?

Have you ever used Ornatrix - apparently they have closed the beta and are going to release Hairtrix based on it. I never used Ornatrix, I think I remember somebody saying that it doesn't work with Vray?
I had no idea how lame and limited the hair/grass solutions where for 3ds until this project, it was truely amazing that something so seemingly essential to our daily grind can be so negelected. I suppose most people do like I did, wing it when they need it and then forget how much of a pain the ass it was until the next time somebody asks for it "sure grass no problem"

[DaForce]

Yeah I have used ornatrix awhile ago.. it worked fine in vray as long as it was converted to geometry, although there was a vray plugin that they release which i believe allowed it to work in its standard atmoshperic mode. But i think devolpment of that got left behind.
Here is some grass I made ages ago using it.


Yeah they are certainly limited... hopefully vlado will bring out something acceptable..given how much vray is used for archvis grass i would have though would have been a biig request.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Nice Grass

That's nice grass - I'm going through the Hair and Fur tutorials using 3ds 8 at the moment, it seems a nice extension for small things - I suppose like hair, but once you get to a large area, it really flips out.
There is also a very annoying bug when style the hair and you close the styling window it messes up the standard 3ds viewports. You can clear them using refresh but is just that bit annoying where you think something else is wrong - like the machine has frozen.
I have to say my intial feelings towards 8 are favourable, the veiwport navigation is much improved, sort of cushion, hard to explain - maybe it is the new maxtreme driver or my over active imagination