Essential LightWave 3D- P19 pptx

12. Render this, and see how it looks. (You may want to add shadowing, so you can see what you’re really getting, if you intend to use it in the finished render. Fur can look very, very different with and without it.) If you’re reasonably happy with the results so far, it’s time to refine it further. Refining the Beard and Mustache Mustache hair tends to grow out from the philtrum (the groove in the center of the upper lip), often leaving the middle without hair at all. Since you can’t vary the combing on a surface with SasLite, the only way to achieve that is to separate the Mustache surface from the Beard surface, and divide it into two pieces. So we’ll do just that. 1. In Modeler, select the polys that form the mustache and hide the rest (tap the <=> key). Then select the half on the positive X axis, and give it a new sur- face, say lMustache. Tap the <"> (<Shift>+<Quote>) key to invert the selection, and name the other side rMustache. (These correspond to the model’s right and left side, not yours.) 2. Return to Layout and open the Object Properties panel if you’ve closed it. Right-click on the line that says SasLite Seen on Beard, and choose Copy from the drop-down menu that appears. Right-click again, and choose Paste. That will give you two identical copies of the displacement. 3. Open one of them and change the Sur- face Name(s) to lMustache. Leave everything else the same, except for the Comb X value. Make it pretty high. (I used 80%, and also lowered the Comb Y value to 5%.) Chapter 20 ······················· 528 Figure 20-32: Divide the surface into three — the beard and two halves of the mustache. 4. Click OK to close it, and use the copy/ paste trick again to make a copy of it. Change the parameters of the copy so that it’s applied to the rMustache sur- face, and put a minus sign in front of the Combing value (for instance, –80%). That will send the hairs along the –X axis, or toward the right cheek, and away from the center of the face. Render to see what you have now. 5. If the break along the philtrum is too pronounced, go back into Modeler, select the points on either side of the center line, and bring them closer to the center. You might also want to split the mustache so it can conform better to the shape of the lip. (I used the Edge tools to do that here.) ················ Simulations 3: Fur and Hair 529 Figure 20-33: New values for the left half of the mustache. Figure 20-34: The beard and mustache. 6. Keep refining and making test renders until you have the beard and mustache you are looking for. Don’t be afraid to add another couple of surfaces, blend the density, put in streaks of a different color, etc. You can have up to eight instances of SasLite in a scene. (If you want more, you can render your scene in a couple of passes, and put them together in post.) 7. For this beard, I added a BeardThin surface on either side of the lower lip (just a couple of very small polys) and a BeardWhite surface to give him a couple of gray streaks. If you want to dissect what I’ve done, you can go through the SasLiteBeard.lwo file on the CD in Objects\Chapter20. Each step listed here corresponds to a layer in the model. Chapter 20 ······················· 530 Figure 20-35: Modify the beard geometry further, if need be. Figure 20-36: Finished beard. 8. When you’re finished, and it’s just what you want, you can cut the beard polys, if you desire, and paste them inside the head. (The SasLite displacements will be on the “Beard” object, not the “Head” object, so you’ll have to copy/paste them to the head if you do this.) The extra polys make it a bit trickier to animate the head (you’ll have to include them in your endo - morphs), but if you can’t afford the full version of Sasquatch, they will let you add believable hair, beards, mustaches, fur, etc., to your models. You can use the same principles anytime you want to vary the length of SasLite fibers. If you want grass to grow higher on the bank of a river, if you want a werewolf’s fur to bristle along his back, if you want to model a soldier with a crewcut — all you need to do is make sub-surface polys, and pull them back for shorter fibers or push them toward the surface for longer ones. (Or, really, just get the full version, and do it the easy way with maps and effectors.) You can do the same thing for eyebrows, eyelashes, and the hair on a character’s head, but there’s another way to accomplish these effects that we have yet to explore. Instead of using subsurface fur patches, we can use long hair guides, which are also supported, in a limited fashion, in SasLite. Creating Hair with Long Hair Guides Long hair guides are two-point poly chains (two-point polys that share a point with another two-point poly) that direct the flow of the fibers. To work in SasLite (or Sasquatch, for that matter), it’s necessary for the point on the “root” end to have a dif- ferent surface than the rest of the chain. (That’s how the plug-in determines which end is which.) They are usually named “Hair” and “Root” to keep things simple. SasLite will generate a lock of hair that follows the general direction of the guide. The number of hairs in that lock, their length, and how closely they follow the guide is determined by the number and placement of polys in the chain and the set - tings in SasLite. Let’s start with the hair on his head. There are several methods to do this, the “point” of all of them being to spend less time creating the guides than it would take to actually grow the hair. Making hair guides can be grueling, but it doesn’t have to be. The more control you want or the more complex the hairstyle, the more guides you’ll need. The process I’m about to show you isn’t the easiest, but it will show you a way to make a whole lot of guides reasonably quickly, without using any third-party plug-ins. You won’t normally need quite this many, but just in case you do, here’s a good way to get them. 1. Begin by lassoing all the polys that could have hair growing from them. Then tap the <}> (right curly bracket) key to Select Connected and get the next ones, too. (Because of the way that subpatches work, the curve changes when polys are abruptly removed. By grabbing the polys next to the ones that you actually want, you can ensure that doesn’t affect the polys you need.) ················ Simulations 3: Fur and Hair 531 2. Paste those polys into a new layer. For this particular method, we’re going to use a lot of points to grow hair guides from, so tap <Ctrl>+<d> (or go to Construct | Convert: Freeze) and freeze the polys, which will make faces from the “virtual” polys in the subpatches. Tap the <Ta b> key to subpatch those polys, and freeze again. (If you don’t think you need as many guides, then you might want to freeze only once, or change the Subpatch level (in either direction) before freezing.) Chapter 20 ······················· 532 Figure 20-37: Select the scalp polys and the ones next to them. Figure 20-38: The poly-rich mesh that results from double-freezing. 3. We don’t need the polys, just the points. So tap <k> (or go to Con - struct | Reduce: Remove | Remove Polygons) to “kill” the polys. That will leave you with a bunch of points that aren’t connected to anything. Copy the whole bunch and paste them into another layer. Now begin to lasso and remove sections to form the actual hairline. As always, it helps if you have a reference. If you accidentally get too many, you can grab them from the pre - vious layer, and paste them in here. Just tap <m> to merge the points, so you won’t have to worry about multiple overlapping point problems. Keep going until you are happy with it. 4. When you’re satisfied, tap <m>to merge points. (Even if you haven’t cop- ied points from another layer it’s good to do this just to be safe.) Then reduce the size of the wig slightly so it fits inside the scalp <H>, tap <J> (or Modify | Transform: Jitter), and jit - ter the points a tiny bit so it looks more like hair roots and less like transplants. Name this layer Roots. (You can name layers in the Layers window found under the Windows menu.) You can delete the points from the previous layer now, if you feel so inclined, or save them “just in case.” 5. We’re going to rail extrude the two-point polys, but right now, we’ve only got points. Rail Extrude doesn’t work on points. Therefore, we must convert our points into polygons. Go to the Create tab and click on Polygons: Points to Polys. Give them the sur- face Root (<q>), copy the whole thing, paste it into another layer, and call it Hair Building.Tap<q> again, and change the surface to Hair. ················ Simulations 3: Fur and Hair 533 Figure 20-39: Trim the extra points away from the hairline. (Original points shown in background for clarity.) 6. Select the one-point polys around the hairline, including a good portion of the front, and place them into an empty layer called Hairline. We’re going to style them more carefully in a few minutes, but it’s easier if the bulk of the hair is done first. (Depending on the style of the hair, these points could be along a part, just in the front, on the side, or wherever the scalp shows.) Chapter 20 ······················· 534 Figure 20-40: The Roots layer, all ready to grow hair! Figure 20-41: Put the Hairline in another layer for more careful treatment. 7. Open an empty layer, and put the Head and Hair Building layers in the back- ground. Beginning at the center, or where the part is, start to make a series of spline curves (you can use whichever of the Curve tools you are most comfortable with). 8. We are going to use Rail Extrude to extrude the one-point polys, which will automatically make two-point poly chains from them. The spline curves we just created are the rails the polys will be extruded along. In SasLite, the actual hairs may appear to be a little shorter than the hair guides, so keep that in mind while you are making them. 9. Work from the hairline at the collar to the front, so you can make each curve slightly overlap the one below it. This will keep the hair falling naturally, instead of having fibers diving under the ones below. 10. Make two to five curves, and then begin to copy/paste them, and move them around the head, rotating so that they will follow the line you want the hair to have. The more curves you use, the smoother the hair will be, but be aware that there are limits to how many splines Rail Extrude can handle before it simply tells you there are too many. (If you reach those limits, you can divide your hair into smaller sec - tions to extrude, of course.) 11. When you have enough to describe the basic shape of the hair, somewhere between 5 and 20 or so, depending on the hairstyle, put the curves in the background, and the Hair Building layer in the foreground. Tap <Ctrl>+ <r> (or Multiply | Extend: Rail Extrude) to open the Rail Extrude: Multiple panel. ················ Simulations 3: Fur and Hair 535 Figure 20-42: Begin to make curves to describe the bulk of the hair. 12. Choose to make Segments according to Length, make them Uniform, and choose around 5 or 6 segments. (There are limits to how many vertices SasLite allows, and they add up quickly.) Leave the Strength at 2, and disable both Oriented and Scaling. 13. Click OK, and you’ll have a bunch of two-point poly hair guides! Name the Chapter 20 ······················· 536 Figure 20-43: The head, with enough rails to describe the main hair mass. Figure 20-44: The Rail Extrude: Multiple panel. layer Wig. We’ll be collecting the hair here as we build it. Now, of course, there are things that can go a little weird at this step. 14. The most common problems are the guides swirling in odd directions, piling up in ridges, and/or leaving bald spots when viewed against the head. Most of these are caused by the same thing — not enough curves for the number of one-point polys being extruded. (I’ve found that sometimes, for some reason, you can also fix the swirling problem by undoing and deleting the last point on the curve. So if you’re pretty sure there are enough, you might want to try that.) To fix them, of course, either add some curves, or extrude a fewer number of one-point polys at once. 15. If a lot of the hair is below the surface, then your splines might be too close to the head. Undo, select all the points on the spline except the endpoints, and use the Size tool <H> to make it all larger. 16. Now, if you want to shape it as you go, which is easier from my point of view (but also requires more steps), cut the hair. (That sounds like barber talk, but I really mean to cut using the <Ctrl>+ <x> shortcut, of course.) 17. Open the Roots layer and paste the hair in. Tap <m> to merge points, and accept the defaults. That will merge each chain with its root. Select the Hair material (using the Statistics window <w>) and tap the <]> key (or go to View | Select: Select Connected)to get the roots, as well. Cut again, and paste back into the Wig layer. Now you can tweak the hair to your heart’s desire, without any fear of the guides becoming disassociated from their roots. Go ahead and do that, shaping it until you are happy with it. The Magnet tool works well for this, but of course you can use any tool you are comfort - able with. ················ Simulations 3: Fur and Hair 537 Figure 20-45: The bulk of the hair guides, made in a snap! [...]... parameters however you want them Figure 20-56 shows what I’m using for this particular model, if you want to copy them Once again, I’m not going into detail about them, since I’ve done that already in the LightWave 8 docs 4 Once that’s done, you need to make a test render to see if your hard work is resulting in the hair you envisioned But, if you render now, you’ll see the polychain hair guides, as well... the SasLite limits when you do.) So, with the Object Properties window still open, click on the Render tab, and set the Object Dissolve to 100% That won’t have any effect on SasLite, but it will cause LightWave to ignore the guides when it renders (Don’t forget to disable the shadowing as well to save render time.) The whole process can take an hour or more, but the results are well worth it (Besides, . copy them. Once again, I’m not going into detail about them, since I’ve done that already in the LightWave 8 docs. 4. Once that’s done, you need to make a test render to see if your hard work is resulting. tab, and set the Object Dissolve to 100%. That won’t have any effect on SasLite, but it will cause LightWave to ignore the guides when it renders. (Don’t forget to disable the shad - owing as well