How many Are Planning to use Hair and Fur
 

How many teams our planning to use the Hair and Fur that came with 3Ds max8? My team has almost decided to give up on it when it comes to animating. Sure it looks great in a photo but it turns into a madusa head when we try to move it.

We also are trying to make a human head in this program and i can never figure out why it dosent look right. Any suggestions?

Re: How many Are Planning to use Hair and Fur
 

yes, we will be using hair and fur. Not a head of hair, but grass and stuff. if we have time, we will try to animate it, but ppl; say they have issues, so maybe not.

Re: How many Are Planning to use Hair and Fur
 

We are trying to use hair too. It doesn't look very good so far, but we are working on it.

Now that I think about it, the guy we have making the person is having a lot of random problems like getting parts to move without bending the wrong direction or something like that. Does anyone have any advice?

Re: How many Are Planning to use Hair and Fur
 

This should probably not be in this topic...

Anyways, try using bone objects / biped objects skinned to your character to make movements look more real. You do this by creating a bone heirarchy in your character, where the top bones are at the roots of limbs or other major areas, and the lower level bones are at the ends of limbs etc... Try to make the bones fit as snugly as possible within your geometry. Then, apply an Animation->Skin modifier to your geometry, and add your bones to the modifier. Use the menu on the right (above where you add the bones) to get into edit envelope mode, and try to change the envelopes so that the geometry that should be affected by each bone is as red as possible, while the surrounding geometry is blue. You can select each bone in turn and tweak envelopes individually. When you are done with that, you can apply IK Solvers to sets of 2 bones, such as a forearm-upperarm or calf-thigh set. Make sure your constraint goes from the top of the upper bone (thigh or upperarm) to the top of the bone after the lower bone in the heirarchy (e.g. a foot or hand bone). Finally, to animate your character, you can simply hide everything but your bones and IK endpoints, and get realistic animation simply by keyframing the IK endpoints at the end of your character's arm or leg.

I realize this looks very complicated - it is, I suppose - but it's not all that bad once you do it a couple times.

Re: How many Are Planning to use Hair and Fur
 

There's a lot of help for hair and fur available online at places like www.cgtalk.com. also this thread is all about it. We were planning on using it this year, until the animation was cancelled. Having myself (the club president) and the team captain as head animators (on a team of 3) didn't help, and now that we're in crunch time, we just can't do it. Oh well

Re: How many Are Planning to use Hair and Fur
 

Yea...that was kind of random.

Thanks for the help anyway hehe.

Re: How many Are Planning to use Hair and Fur
 

I was working on hair early on, styling it, but we gave up on it cause of how long it took to render. On record, I had created slicked-back hair, einstein hair, macguyver hair, and relatively normal hair. Styling it takes surprisingly little time after you get the hang of it.