Arctic fox: furred!

I cheated on this because I used a red fox model (arctic foxes look a little bit different, more compact and less skinny, slightly different head shape.
The process of creating fur was straightforward and, believe it or not, I didn't need to comb hair at all.
The whole fur has been accomplished using the taper, spherize and length deformers, and the randomize roots and randomize length on full hair.
Used the scale tool a little bit just to balance some fur spots, and rendered in 22 minutes using the advanced shader provided with LAMH.
Added a subtle HDR toning to enhance contrast a bit.
Hope you like it...

The arctic fox: furred!

The un-furred version

Density maps: quick overview

"Quick and dirty" example showing how you can assign a density map to a surface, and how that will affect hair population.
As explained in the movie, hair density will be calculated gathering grey scale values, where white pixels is full density, black pixels account for no hair, and grey values will be used to calculate interpolated densities.

Deformers and selection controls

In this movie I'm giving a quick overview of the available deformers and how those can be combined to quickly shape hair. I'm also showing how to use selection controls to mask some areas so that deformers and styling will only apply to those.
Notice how some of the deformers can be applied to one or more axis simultaneously (see that small xyz mini widget along the deformer slider), and how you can combine deformers to produce different results.

As a side note, as explained earlier in this blog, preview hair may have some sharp corners but those will be "smoothed" during the render, producing nice spline curves.


Please watch the movie HD and full screen to appreciate all the details.

New feature: the Scene Explorer

I worked very hard during last two weeks and so now it's time to start showing some of the new features.

The first one is the Scene Explorer, which allows to easily add a figure or a prop available in the Studio scene directly to the Look at my Hair framework.

With figures, it's even possible to choose specific nodes to load.

As usual, here is a brief movie to demonstrate the new feature:

African woman hair

Continuing experiments with crispy hair: here is anAfrican female test render, and two versions with some HDR filters applied.
Click to see full size.

Afro look on the way...

In this example, I didn't even have to comb hair: I used the spherize and the curl deformers to get a very basic shape, and scaled hairs on front a little bit.
Yet not a real afro hair with extremely crispy hairs, but that will come in time...

Meerkat: larger render

Hi think this looks better, it's a render with higher quality. I added the background manually in postwork.
Click it to see full size.

Meerkat: furred!

Another figure nicely furred! A meerkat, little cute african animal.

Symmetric editing

Since somebody asked if it is possible to edit hair symmetrically, here comes a video that demonstrates it.

Spherize and Taper effects

I don't recall ever demonstrating these two effects: they are very important to quickly shape guide hairs.
The spherize effect nicely round all the hairs down, a bit like gravity.
The taper effect will evenly taper hairs down along the vertical axes.
Well,  I'm sure the video will clearly show those effects better than my words...

Quick setup for follicle areas

Besides using the follicle brush to add or remove follicles, or the marquee tool on larger areas, another cool feature is the possibility to add or remove the follicles belonging to a specific surface. So for example you'll be able to discard hidden or unwanted parts like eyes, nails, mouth and else.

Windows porting: OK

One of my biggest concerns was the amount of time needed to port Look at my Hair to Windows (I work on Mac). While Qt libraries should (and do) guarantee portability, I was worried about the openGL code and multi-thread support routines.
Instead, I was able to complete the port in one afternoon only: good news, this will speed times for good.
Nothing exciting, but here is a screenshot to "prove" that LAMH Windows version is "alive"!