I find that the hair system needs to be possible to shut ON/OFF at will like the visible/non visible of a bone.
A lot of hair on a model is natural when you work with a female actor like I do right now, but it messes a lot. The computer freezes sometimes because its to much to do with the hair. If I remove the hair everything is fast and simple to handle. But with hair it becomes much more LOAD:ed, I run a 3.6GHz machine so it shouldn't need to be such a strain!

Hair colour is another thing I don't really understand yet! Look at this map:
[attachmentid=20222]

I think it should produce a dominating BLACK hair with just a dash of lilac.... But she has lilac hair !
I will write more when I have experimented more with this !

When you assign hair it is very good to start at 1 control point and 2 cm long hair... But if you handle a female model like me you want much longer hair and more control of styling.. I use 3 control points and I have about 20-25 cm of hair on my model... it is still quite easy to comb her :-) but it must be done against the red dotted splines that you find randomly among the hair... The initial 1 cp and 2 cm hair is easy and let's you design a road map for how the hair will eventually react!

Another thing that I found is that when you work in ACTION to create a animation pattern, the hair end will stay if your model moves her hair.. ( if you do a render to check the frame everything is fine ) this phenomena is also active during chor and it is as easy to fix just a test render, but it is irritating.

I have also got exception error #001 and then found myself back at windows desktop! I run XPP

I would like to learn more about the colormap and the colouring of hair, females and animals can have a variety of colours represented by hair, so that is one thing I would like some ideas about!!

I haven't had time yet to really render movements with this model, but I expect that it will look awesome to see a lot of hair flicker about and follow her movements... Has anybody tried this with V13 yet? How did it work ? Any examples ?

Another thing that I haven't tested yet is to create say 3 patches top of head, mid part and lower part, assign 3 different lengths of hair and density to see if that can lighten the load for the machine when handling a lot of hair...

Animation Master Rock:s!

Particles (Hair) can be turned on and off via shortcut key or in the render panel(s).

I believe it is F5.

(Here's a tip: If you go into TOOLS/CUSTOMIZE on the Keyboard panel there is an export button.
Click on that and a list of your 'current' Shortcut Keys will be generated. You can save this list for easy reference.)




Suggest lowering the density of the hair while you work with it. Then increase the density only when nearing completion.

Another nice option would be to have more than one hair material.
They would be much the same but one would have low density (and be otherwise optimized for real time).


You know... I believe it does too.


Some of the other questions you presented might be alleviated if you find a good workflow.

If you haven't seen the Tech Talks I think you'll really enjoy those.
Especially with your background.

Look for the one on Hair!

Hash Inc Tech Talks