Alex. Hair-Farm in Maya animation

[anishmations]

go to video on vimeo

Made at Fat Balloon Animations.
This started as an experiment to test using hairfarm (a 3ds max plugin) on a character totally animated in Maya.
All the assets were made and animated in Maya. The hair alone was composited in 3dsMax.
so its now like Hair-Farm is for Maya (or any other app) too

More of him coming soon

Character Design : Siju Thomas
Animation : Anand Kumar, Nilabh Umredkar
Models, hair & Character Textures : Anish Mohan
Set Textures and Lighting : Udaya Shankar
FX : Vivek Prashanth
Compositing and Sound : Anish Mohan

alex.jpg (10.4 KiB) Viewed 31845 times

[cem]

I looks great! I'm looking forward to learning more about how you transferred your assets between max and maya. Did you render the rest of the scene in maya?

Also, you could model the hair in max and transfer it to maya as guide strands and do the whole hair rendering in maya. You wouldn't have the advantages of the Hair Farm Renderer though.

[anishmations]

Glad you liked it Cem.
We tried exporting the whole scene as FBX, but the character rig and animation just wouldn't transfer well. It must be the constrains and stuff that FBX isnt still ready for.
I am making a small write up on the process we followed for doing this. Will post it here sometime soon.
The rest of the scene was lit and rendered in Maya itself. Only the hair was rendered from Max.
We dint try rendering hair or even creating hair in maya. Just knew that its a long unsure process. So just wanted to keenly experiment on hairfarm on this maya scene.

[cem]

Great work, Anish! I'm looking forward to learning more about your process.

[anishmations]

Oops! I have not prepared the writeup yet !!
I am getting a different error each time i try exporting the maya scene file to max! And sometimes I guess theres no error at all! Anyways will share our tip asap.

Anyways here is another of Alex's clips. Made in the same way.. Hair from hairfarm-max and the rest animated and rendered in Maya.

go to video on vimeo

Cheers!

[Luiz Amaral]

Hello there Anish,

You could try point cache to communicate with Max. i don't know if the native point cache of bolt apps are compatible but you can make a tool with maxscript that reads the point cache from Maya...

I would try something like that if I needed to have Hair Farm on a Maya project.

Best of luck,

Luiz

[anishmations]

I tried point cache, but the hair scalp wouldnt move with the animated mesh because I think the point cached animation is treated only like a series of blendshapes/morphers (without the actual pivot getting translated as in the real animation) So the linked hair just stood where it was. What I did was bake the animated joints in maya and export them to max (not all of the bones got exported intact, but all I wanted was the head bone to come well) and then linked the hair to that bone.
The camera export came thru well too. So it comped just right.

[animagic]

In Max you can duplicate the point cached character, and delete all of the mesh except for the scalp. As long as this is done above the point cache mod it will still use the same point cache. This is how I do it here. Works very well actually. Nice animation BTW.

Regards,
Mike