Hey there.

I am working on a character wich requires full body hair. The base mesh is about 3500 polies, and will be mudboxed into submission (or into something that looks cool, which ever is easier ;) )

Eventually i want the base model to be at the most around 60.000 polies. since its not going to be animated this will not be a problem. But here comes the problem. When i use 3dsmax’s hair solution, it will create hair guides for styling at every vertex. wich means that it will create a huge amounts of styling guides, way more then i need and way more then my computer (or me for that matter) can handle comfortably.
So yea, the question as u can guess is, can i lower the amount of guides to style with, without changing my character poly count.

I know that u would usually use a lower poly mesh then the high detail mesh (wich is about at 1.000.000 polies). Problem is that the base mesh doesnt have any detail in the face, so if i lower the mesh (to put fur on) 2 much, even the larger details in the face disapear. wich means that when i would render, the hair on the face will mostly just hover in front of the face and most certainly not follow any details on the face.

I have looked everywhere in the help-file, but i’m getting the impression its just not possible (?)

So if its possible please let me know, and if not, what would be the right way to approach this problem.

ps.

I found that autodesk also has a stand alone hair solution called “HairFX” and it seems to be better then joe alters version in max. is this true?

I would also like a solution to this…

I have a simple cable that has small string like attachments on it and of course the amount of guide hairs is crazy. My cable is very long and uses a path deform in an animation.

Is there no way to reduce the number of guides? I would only need a few..

Q

Intel i7 920 with 6 gig Ram. 64 bit Win7. Max 2009 and Max 2011
Small 5 machine render farm of mixed machines.
More coffee please!  :-)

The best way to handle this is using recomb splines.  Since you’l have a few different resolutions of the mesh you should do most of your styling on the lowrez mesh.  However on the “Head” where you need more detail use just that part of the head mesh.

So try to separate out the two meshes that you’ll need.

Also you can try to use just one lowrez mesh but use just the “Hi-Rez Head” object as a collision object while styling.  That way your guides are less and will comb to the high res surface.

Hope this helps

PS
HairFX is now Hairtrix and it’s not made by autodesk, it’s a plugin at turbosquid.  It has its own + & -

max2008-11