I have been working on a horses tail. I am using 13n and I must have crashed 27 times tonight playing with hair. Has anyone else had problems with 13n?


Steve

I've been playing with hair recently with few problems.
My main problem was a noticable slow response.

I recently upgraded this computer to 2GB of RAM though so I'm sure that has helped.
Particles/Hair is computationally intensive.

As you don't mention any specific time where your system crashed its hard to say.
Were you crashing while rendering? While trying to manipulate hair? (Too many variables)

There are several things you can do to increase your chance of success.
- Save often
- Work with limited hair density
- Decrease realtime display of hair
- Turn off Particles while/if changing geometry
- Isolate trouble spots and avoid those
- Report reproducible problems to A:M Reports

Something to add to Rodney's list:

Turn hair dynamics OFF when grooming and turn it back on when you are ready to test it. It makes sense really but is easily overlooked.

Hi Rodney and Paul

It was while I was grooming and applying the material.

Some of the time the system would crash when just applying the hair to the patches. Some of the crashes happened during modification to the hair in PWS. Some of the crashes were while I was grooming (Paul I found that out turnoff dynamics while grooming).

Others happened during a launch of the software. Some were what appears to be an Open Gl glitch. Not sure on the that however. The software would state could not realtime render. And nothing I could do at that point but to remove the material / hair. One thing to note I rendered a 10 sec with hair on one area of the model and no crashes on the render farm.

The other was the most frustrating. I would have one area of hair completed and then I would apply the material to another and it would crash the program everytime. It appears that I am limited to one material on the model. I am modeling a horse and the mane would be ok and then I would apply hair to the tail and the system would lock up. Or I would start with the tail and everything was ok, and then apply to the mane and the system would lock up. I would have to kill AM restart and then wade through all the realtime error messages and delete the materials (both), save and restart AM.

So I had to improvise and had hair on the mane and then decalled the tail with a picture of the hair.

Steve

I too, was playing with hair recently only to find it does not work all the same as it did back in V11. I did'nt have any problems with applying second instances of the hair material...but I did have trouble setting the hair's color. I wanted to make a gradient so the hair was darker at the roots using the color percentage graph but anything I set would not take on the hair. I could only set the hairs color away from it's group/base color by setting an image to be mapped to the hair...which is cool but NOT what I wanted to accomplish. I plan to submit it, but if someone here says, 'WORKS FOR ME!' I will not.

I don't know if any advances have been done to Hair in the last two(12,13,14) versions. It seems to be a feature that they hurriedly threw in to the app to say 'Look we have a hair feature' and then moved on to other features for the same reason. I would love to see them re-address the hair feature applying what has been learned thru the SimCloth or Newton Dynamics approaches, as both of them seem to have collision-detection functioning better. I hope whoever is in charge of the SimCloth feature does not move on in the same manner, cause SimCloth is considered a W.I.P. feature to me as well... as was implied from Hash from the get-go.

Personally, I have taken a step back, and am modelling hair in the 'helmet-head' manner but using lots of dynamic constraints for liveliness. I am also trying to get cloth to work as hair and am using the 'render as lines' feature to model individual hairs for detail. It's OK but I sure would LOVE to have a better hair feature, period.

There is a reason why even highly financed feature films like "Monster House" steer away from particle hair and go with geometry instead. Not only is particle hair computationally intensive... it's hard to get it to resemble 'realistic' hair. Kinda defeats the purpose if it can't be done to a high enough standard within budget constraints.

I'm not familiar with other attacks on hair used with other programs but I think Hash Inc's feature is pretty robust. Its not easy to know what all those options are all about though... not for me at least.

I'd like to think we could explore hair through and through here in the forum but most of us are still stuck in the basics. There isn't a whole lot of need for hair when we can't even get the basics committed to memory.

Some people seem to have the knack for this hair thing though.
When you post information on it you definitely get my attention.

I'm glad we've got hair in A:M to play around with though.
One never knows when it might prove very useful.

Thanks for the comments. I have rendered the animation and the hair turn out ok. It was my first attempt at hair and with the small amount on the animal I am happy with the results and the render time per frame on the farm was less than 2:30.

Is this something that needs AM report or am I doing something wrong?

The funny thing all the hair that crashed did have a gradient applied.

Steve

I noticed something as I continue to play. The dynamics in the rig such as tail or ear dynamics also played a part in the system crashing. After turning off the dynamics within the model and hair I did not crashed until a created a second material / hair and applied it to the model. Only after several minutes of grooming did the system crash. I could not reload the model without deleting all of the hair materials

Steve

If hair is that hard to use, why use it at all?

Max hair works really good, no problems.

sj

Thanks Hash for verion 13.0o

Finally I can control the hair on my model. Version "o" corrected a problem with slow response because of dynamitcs ON/OFF function associated with hair in the model's groups assignment. The correction allowed me to turn off the dynamitcs and not receive a rendering error. As long as it was turned on there was never a problem except it took forever to position or brush the hair.

I was just ready to send off a bug report and noticed a new version. So on the off chance I checked it out, WA LA, it fixed all the problems I was having with slow response for now!

The proof of the pudding will be if the hair material is downward compatiable. So far every verison change I had to trash the hair material and make a new one to eliminate the strange behaver with the hair...

I spoke too soon. The hair was working fine until I tried a rendering a movie with dynamics on as shown in attached file:
[attachmentid=23190]

I have a fifteen second rendering here without dynamics on :
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseacti...eoid=1566795499