Mandrill

A mandrill, created out of the Genesis Gorilla. Exported the head and neck in ZBrush, morphed it, made a very basic texture and imported in LAMH. Created the hair, styled, rendered. Made some adjustments and a little bit of HDR toning in second image.
Hair are way too thick (visible especially near the mouth), anyway is a good result.

The final result

Some HDR toning on this

Mammoth from .obj file

For a change I decided to export the Mammoth hair model into one single .obj file and render the model in KeyShot.
The geometry consists of almost 1.875.232 quads, file size 335Mbytes (see image below); as explained in a previous post, LAMH also generates the texture, so you have all the necessary to render the hair model with an external application.

This was really a quick render (less than 2 minutes), just to show how geometry generated by LAMH can be used with a wide range of applications.

Entering Beta phase

Finally, after months of development, I decided Look at my Hair it's mature enough to enter the beta testing phase.
The team has been established and will start its work in a few days.
Here is a simple screenshot showing the current interface: as you can see we have a left viewport where you can style and model hair (you can easily trigger the comb, scissor, scale tool and use the mouse to style hair), and a tool widget on the right subdivided in four main sections:

- the Global controls (import, export, load and save projects, resync objects, create/delete shave groups, brush controls, clipping controls);
- the Follicles section (add/remove single follicles, through the marquee rectangular tool or inheriting surface configuration)
- the Styling section (grow guide hair and apply different deformers to get the proper shape)
- the Full Hair section (grow full hair with different densities, randomize roots, randomize lengths, razor tool, tuft tool)

There are also several dialogs that allow to setup program options (can choose your own background, in this case I used a blackboard one), setup materials and properties for each shave group and lot more.
Stay tuned for more information incoming next days...

Grizzly cub: furred!

Look at my Hair beta 1.0 is ready and will be dispatched to beta testers next week.
So I have some spare time to play with it and today I decided to do a test render on a Poser/DAZ figure I started some time ago: the Grizzly Cub.
Here are two renders and two screenshots showing Look at my Hair in action.
Hope you like it!

Exporting to .obj: cool news

I finished working on the "Export to .obj" section, and I was glad I could achieve the same "texture transfer" feature as with the "Export to RenderMan" section.

This means that when exporting to the Wavefront .obj file format (which you can use with your preferred external render application like Lux/Reality, Indigo, Octane etc.), you can optionally have Look at my Hair create a fur texture for you, gathering colors directly from the underlying model and assigning those properly to each hair strand. This is just cool and I wanted to share this information.

Here are two images showing the result of the texture transfer to .obj, and a third image showing the texture created automatically during the export process.

figure

the .obj furred mesh

the fur texture generated during the export process

Making of the Mammoth: part 1

This is the first part of the "Making of the Mammoth" video tutorial.

As you'll see from the movie, using deformers is such a cool way to develop and model a basic fur model very quickly. And combing, scaling and cutting hairs is just straightforward...

The movie has been encoded at 3X the normal speed, so the part where I use the shave groups material editor happens too fast: don't worry, I'm going to show how that works in Part 2.
So I hope you'll enjoy this movie and stay tuned because part 2 is due very soon!

PS: please head up here and watch the video HD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ1Qlh4E184

More work on the Mammuth

I had to make new movies for the "Making the Mammuth" tutorial movies, and so I decided to do some renders.
Here is a new render done in Studio 4.5 and a "ice age" composition.
I think tomorrow I'll be able to upload the movies, in my opinion are really worth a look.

PS: the background used has been made by kip0130 at deviantart: be sure to check out all the amazing stuff this guy has: http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=kip0130#/d16hnd8

Fluffy caiman? Yes we can!

There you go with a couple of fluffy caimans…
First one with fur colors transferred from underlying body texture, second one with a punk fur, violet blending to orange/yellow!

Mammoth: furred!

Finally also the Mammoth get some fur! I recorded the whole process and will also make a Youtube movie to show how easily did that in Look at my Hair.

For now, just take a look at the renders and enjoy!

DAZ Studio render

Mild HDR effect to enhance specular and contrast

The un-furred version: yes he looks sad!