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Create fast and easy hair using Maya

Creating fast and easy hair using Maya Fur

By Frank Abney (frankabney@gmail.com) Or visit him on the web at: http://frankabney.com/

Step 01

First off, you want to have your character fully unwrapped if you plan to attach fur to it. In this case I will be extracting polygons from the model to make a scalp for the hair to go on.

Step 02

For the scalp, what you want to do is try to get the UV’s in one shell and as flat as you can. It makes it easier once you place your fur on it. For UVing the scalp I used a separate program called UV layout. It’s very simple. First you export your scalp as an OBJ out of maya. File>export selection> choose obj as the file type.

Note: if you do not see obj, you may need to load the plugin by going to window>settings/preferences>plug-in manager, once you bring that window up, make sure next to obj load is checked, and also check auto load

Step 03

Once you have that, open your scalp in UV Layout (you can drag the obj file onto the program’s icon. When it opens be sure to select New in the load options, this will guarantee that you’re starting off with fresh non edited UVs. Then hit load.

This will load your scalp in a viewport similar to Maya

Step 05

Move your cursor over the scalp and press "d". This will drop it into the editing window.

Step 06

Once in the editing window hit "f" to flatten your mesh, hold until the mesh is completely flat. Then hit save.

Step 07

Import you’re the obj file (file>import) you saved over back into Maya and make sure it fits in the UV space (it won’t!). Select the UVs and scale it down until it takes up as much room as you like (Rt click on the mesh>select UV as the selection method). Select all UVs by simply dragging a box around the whole mesh. Then hit "r" to scale. Drag from the center box to scale uniformly.

Step 08

Place the scalp inside your model’s head, (You may have to scale it down a bit). Once it’s inside the model’s head go into the fur tab in your shelf where you will find the fur examples.

Note: Leave just enough for the scalp not to be seen outside of the model. You could probably scale it down to 0.99 in the x, y, and z values.

Make sure that you must select the scalp, then click on which fur preset you want.

Step 09

For this tutorial and character I will be using the Mouse fur example. Feel free to try whichever you thing will best suit your character needs. So, right out of the gate we see that from flattening our scalp we get a nice flow of fur. But it’s not quite what I want. All the fur is flowing in one direction, and I want a more natural brushed or combed look to.

Step 10

Now we will render our quick hair style out and see what results we have. I have a light setup already and am using final gather (which can be render heavy). Here’s our first render without changing any settings:

Step 11

Now we want to brush our hair in the desired direction. For this we will go into Maya Fur’s "Paint Fur Attributes" tool, which can be found under the fur menu while in the Rendering module. As you will see there are many attributes that you can paint, some others I may use later like baldness and length, for now we will just go with direction.

Step 12

Now I have more of a natural brush direction! Also, now be sure to increased my UV samples to see more of the hair. Note: This is only for display, it doesn’t increase the number of hairs at render time.

Step 13

Now that I have the direction I want, I’m going to go into the length I want. For this, I will go back in to the "Paint Fur Attributes" tool and use the baldness and the length. This works with artisan brush settings on a 0-1 scale; 0 meaning no effect and 1 meaning full. (You can change this in the tool settings for the brush).

Step 14

Now that we have our hair looking how we want it, we can fine tune and take a look at some fur settings. These settings are pretty self explanatory so I won’t go into them in this tutorial. Some that may not be so self explanatory I will give a quick description:

Density- This will control the number of hairs at Render time.
Global scale- The overall length of your hair (doesn’t control pieces).
Inclination- This controls the incline of your head, you can have it real close to the head, or sticking straight out using this setting.
Attraction- This comes in to play if you want to attach a hair system to your fur for simulation with your animation.

Note: After you decide on all your settings bake your attributes. Especially, if you apply a texture to the tip color, base color, etc. It will not show up until you bake attributes.

So now, here is after some adjustments to: inclination, scraggle, and tip color.

Step 15

Now after making a few adjustments lets do another render using the below: For rendering I’ve used these settings (any settings not shown, I haven’t touched):

Step 17

The final render

To achieve the above render’s appearance, I used the following fur settings:

To Achieve a Different Look

If you want to achieve a more scraggly look, watch how easily you can achieve this just by changing some settings. I changed tip curl to 0.75, decreasing inclination to 0.8, and scraggle to 0.4. Then I added some clumping, by changing the clumping value to 1.2.

Tutorial Complete

Here are some Quick Tips to help you through the process:

If you don’t want to change your fur globally, you can use the "paint fur attributes" method described earlier to paint in specific areas or your hair.

Fur shadowing attributes located in the fur menu can add realism to your hair. Select your light and shift select your hair, then go to Fur>fur shadowing attributes>add to selected light.

If you don’t want to attach a hair system to your fur for simulation, a quick way to get some movement is to animate the attributes such as inclination, tip curl, base curl, roll, etc.

Close up shots will render a lot longer, so keep that in mind when framing for animation or something related.

This fur method is not limited to just head hair; you can use these same steps for eyebrows, facial hair, and grass, so explore the different options.