You can assign a Paint Effects brush to a hair system to achieve a variety of effects. In these next steps you apply the red beads brush to the hair system to create the beaded curtain. Then you modify the brush and hair system settings to achieve the desired look.

To turn the hair curtain into a beaded curtain

1. To select the hair system, drag around the hair curves and select Hair > Convert Selection > To Hair Systems.
2. Open the Visor ( Window > General Editors > Visor).
3. Go to the glass folder and select the beadsRed.mel brush.
4. Select Hair > Assign Paint Effects Brush to Hair.

   You don’t see the beads in the scene view, but you will when you render it later using the mental ray for Maya renderer. The brush needs some adjustments to make it look like a beaded curtain when it is rendered.

5. In the hairSystemShape1 tab of the Attribute Editor, set the following:
   • Hairs Per Clump to 1 so there is one strand of beads
   • Hair Width to 0.03
   • In the Shading section; under Hair Color Scale, set Hair Color to white so the brush’s bead color appears
   • In the Hair Color Scale section, Specular Color to red
   • in the Displacements section, Noise to 0.5 to create some variety in the appearance and behavior of the beads
6. In the beadsRed tab of the Attribute Editor, go to the Texturing section and change the RepeatU to 10 so the beads appear as a more realistic bead size. (If the beadsRed tab does not appear in the Attribute Editor, re-select the hair curves. The beadsRed tab should now appear.)
7. Before you can render in mental ray for Maya, you must convert Paint Effects to polygons. Drag around the hair curves to select the hair system and select Modify > Convert > Paint Effects to Polygons.
8. Dolly in close to the curtain ( + ) and click the button to render the current frame.