View Hair System
A Hair System is a set of tools and shaders that allow you to create realistic looking hair and other fiber effects, such as carpet, cloth fuzz, and natural effects such as grass and feathers. A combination of special geometry shapes called “hair guides” are used to interact with the system. These guides can be placed across a target hair surface in a variety of different ways to suit your specific needs. Hair guides can also be styled, animated, and even interact with dynamics systems for more realism.
Numerous “grooming” tools allow you to style the hair to meet your purpose. There are many different tools available, from combs and brushes to even a tool that helps you make parts in the hairstyle if you wish. There are also many guide management tools as well, and you can even save guides and apply them to other hair surfaces as needed, saving you from having to recreate a great style from scratch. You can even convert guides that you import from other DCC applications into native hair guides.
Hair guides are not actually rendered; instead, hairs are created at render time directly within the render engine. This helps to conserve memory, and keeps things tidy overall. Typically, hair is grown between the guides themselves, modified as seen fit by your direction, and then shaded by the rendering engine using the hair materials and characteristics that you specify in the user interface.
As much as hair is about style, shape and motion, it’s mostly about appearance. To that end, the hair system has a fantastic hair material! Its extremely versatile, and with a bit of study, you can literally recreate any hair, plant or fiber look you’ve ever seen. The hair material is very deep; it can be intimidating, especially if you just dive right in, without any foundation to build upon. Here it helps to use the tutorials and available videos, as these materials are intended to help you get going as quickly as possible.