Introduction
 
 
 

With Maya® Hair TM , you can create a dynamic hair system to model realistic hairstyles and hair behavior.

Since Hair is a generic dynamic curve simulation, you can also use these curves to create non-hair effects, including ropes, chains, a suspension bridge, sea creatures, or lofted surface from a curve.

With Hair you can simulate:

A hair system is a collection of hair follicles.

A hair follicle in human hair typically hosts one hair, whereas in Maya each hair follicle hosts a hair curve. The hair follicle controls the attributes and curves associated with a particular hair clump, and how the hairs attach to a NURBS or polygonal surface. The input to each follicle is a Start Position NURBS curve, a surface and a UV position to attach to.

When creating hair, the hair system output can be in the form of NURBS curves, Maya® Paint Effects TM strokes, or both. If the specified output when creating hair is NURBS Curves, each follicle will contain one NURBS curve that represents the position of the hair in that follicle. If the specified output is Paint Effects, each follicle has a hair clump, made up of Paint Effects strokes.

There are various attributes on a hair system for modifying the look and behavior of the hair as a whole. There are also follicle level attributes that will override the hair system attributes; the visible result will be affected by both the follicle and hair system attributes.

You can have more than one hair system on the same surface.

With the Paint Hair Tool you can create new hair systems, add and remove follicles, as well as paint hair attributes, including Clump Width Scale, Stiffness, and Braid.

Paint Effects hair can be rendered using the Maya Software renderer. You can also convert Paint Effects hair to polygons and render in another renderer, such as mental ray® for Maya®. Or you can output just the dynamic NURBS curves to an external renderer, such as Renderman.

Consider outputting to Paint Effects if you want to:

Consider outputting to NURBS curves if you want to:

Consider outputting to both NURBS curves and Paint Effects if you want to: