OK, I think I'm starting to get a handle on this Anything Grows stuff. I decided to back-up a bit, and just explore what the different controls do. I thought I'd share my approach with you, in hopes it might prove helpful.

Warning: These might be beyond basic for some folks, and even painfully obvious to others. However, sometimes I need information broken down into small, easily-digestible chunks.

Just in case some of you do too...

I started with a grid, and made a texture map divided into four colors: Black, White, Light Gray and Dark Gray. Of course, that was too boring so I mixed it with blue to make it more interesting.

I also made a solid White, a solid Black, and a solid 50% Gray texture.

Then I added the Anything Grows modifier to the grid. I used a low strand count (500) so that it would be easier to see what the individual strands were doing (I also turned off shadows for the grid to aid viewing). I used a width of .1, a length of 3, two segments per strand and a Stiffness of zero.

I changed the Gravity Direction Z to 0%. X and Y were already at 0%, and I left them there.

Next I used the grid shader as the Length Shader. The darker the color, the shorter the length. Black would have taken the length to zero, but since I mixed the grid with blue I got a little razor stubble.

Next I cleared out the length shader, then I maxed out the Wiggle slider. I left the X, Y and Z Wiggle Shaders clear. I confess that I didn't really understand what this was doing, aside from randomizing strand directions.

This is where the White, Black and Gray shaders came in handy. I finally got a glimmer of what was happening when I set the X wiggle shader to White, and thet Y and Z wiggle shaders to 50% Gray. The strands all lean in the positive x direction.

Then, I changed the X wiggle shader to Black. Now the strands point in the negative x direction.

And here's the grid with X wiggle shader set to Gray and Y wiggle shader set to White.

Here it is with the X wiggle shader and Y wiggle shader set to the grid shader.

I suppose the next step is to combine Anything Grows with animated shaders (all time we spent playing with formulas recently was well spent, I suspect).

There are some real possibilities here, I think. Amber waves of grain anyone?

This was very helpful for me. Thanks again for a good tutorial! -Kix

-Kix

Thank you, Kixum. I hope Eric will chime in if I said anything too grossly incorrect, or overlooked something important.

Excellent examples, I couldn't have said it better! Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

Is this exportable? And if so, is it manageable, or would a furry character exported to Poser be too much for a less-than-state-of-the-art system?

The geometry exports, but I haven't tried importing it to Poser yet.

It is exportable, but I have not tested doing a character for poser. I just did an export of a simple plane with 10000 strands and 10 segments each. It created an 11meg OBJ file which imported into poser in about 20 seconds on a 1ghz PIII. Poser was surprisingly responsive with that big model, actually much more so than Carrara! As for how well it would work on a real model brought in as a Poser figure, I can't really say. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

I thought of a quickee an experiment. Make a simple fuzzy caterpillar out of 4 or 5 spheres, and turn is into a Poser figure. Does that sound a fair test? I can try it when I get home tonight, but if someone else wants to give it shot before then, please do!