nyar1ath0tep, I bet you think I forgot about your question. I haven't gotten the results I want when attempting to make long hair. The settings I used for the monstrosity above were length of 16, 4 segments, with Y and Z gravity direction set to -100. You can get it to hang down further by increasing the segment count. This makes each segment shorter, so the "gravity bend" has greater effect. This really can eat up the memory, though. Now, since the first segment is basically oriented along the normal of the facet it's generated from, I'm betting if you could make just the first segment shorter, you get the look right. Perhaps it would be nice to control the last segment length, too. In the example above, if the first segment were really short, and the last segment were really long, I'd be pretty close to the look I was going for.

Oops! Forgot the picture. Sorry about that. Need... more... coffee...

Um, just wanted to add I'm still happy with the Anythign Grows. I don't want Eric thinking I'm slamming his product. It's just that I'm an engineer by trade, and nitpicking towards improvements is my nature.

Here's my guy having a better hair day. I really like the way the beard turned out.

And just for fun, here's a Toon! version.

The memory problem is why I think post-rendered hair is preferable to geometry-based hair. If you take Eric's hair model, cut down the number of strands and increase their polygon count, maybe somehow you could calculate (prior to rendering) intermediate strands based on the weighted averages of the geometry strands. Then you could keep the actual geometry to a minimum, but the rendered hair would have many more strands than the geometry. Like if each geometry strand was the center of a hexagonal array of rendered strands, then you could have a ratio of rendered to geometry strands of 6:1, 18:1, 36:1, 60:1, 90:1 or even larger.

I've been playing with the demo. and I can't get the strands to bend close enough to the head to get a natural look either. A way to vary the segment length to control where the bend occurs would give much better results.

I also think nyar1ath0tep's idea with using the geometry to calculate intermediate strands for the rendered image is a good idea.

On the other hand, it's kind of cool to be able to export the geometry. I like to make poser figures, and I think that will be a real plus. Solution is obvious: Eric just has to make us TWO hair products. Easy-peasy.

Hi folks,

Here's a few suggestions that might help short term(you know without writing a new post render product ;) ).

1. Gravity can go up to 200%, so if you want to bend quickly, kick up the gravity. I'll probably kick up this limit in the next revision.

2. If you mix gravity directions, you'll lose some magnitude down. Since the vector is normalized -100% y and -100% z means you'll only get about square root of 2 * -100% z.

3. Stiffness reduces gravity, obviously, but here's a rough outline how the numbers go and it might help when you are trying to adjust the numbers. First calculate how far along the strand you are. This is how far towards the wiggle and the gravity you will bend. First we bend towards the wiggle, reducing the bend by the stiffness. Next we take that new vector and bend towards the gravity reducing that by the stiffness.

4. Using the Preview mode on the primitive will keep memory usage down while you're working on your model, but still allow lots of strands at render time. A large portion of the memory that AGro uses is actually memory required by Carrara's 3D View to visualize the object. So while a 320k strand object with 20 segments would bring a top end machine to it's knees in the 3DView, if preview mode is set to Ultra Low, it will still be fairly responsive and still render at full resolution.

Finally, I want to hear what you think. Work on Anything Grows 2 will start shortly so let me know your concerns, suggestions, etc.

Thanks,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Freeware and commercial 3D extensions
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

I was using gravity of 200. I'll try changing the y-direction to 0, and then maybe adjusting to get the hair out of his face. After I wrote the bit about longer last segment, it occured to me I could try using a long-skinny tip object. Those experiments look promising, so far. Might also work for short, kinky hair. I'll have to practice with the wiggle shaders, too; I haven't got a good feel for using those yet.

You might try wiggle to get the hair out of the face instead of Y gravity. Good Luck, Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

I think I've been confused about what wiggle actually did (I am often confused, so this is nothing new). I'll experiment again tonight, and see if I can get Mr. Chia to behave himself. Everybody keep in mind that it's not really a fair test of Anything Grows capabilities if I don't use it correctly! OK?

Ok. I think you're doing fine. Learning takes time. My real hair looks like your first image anyway. -Kix

-Kix