Hair overview

Maya Hair is a component of Maya Unlimited that you use to create a dynamic hair system so you can 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.

To get started quickly using Maya Hair, a Hair tutorial is included with Maya. The Hair tutorial is one of the many comprehensive tutorials in the Getting Started with Maya Unlimited guide. To access the Hair tutorial, select Help > Tutorials.

Hair connections

A hair system is a collection of hair follicles. A NURBS or polygonal surface can have multiple hair systems on the same surface and one hair system can span multiple surfaces.

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^™ 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.

Paint Hair Tool

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

Rendering Hair

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 images^® mental ray^®. Or you can output just the dynamic NURBS curves to an external renderer, such as Pixar^® RenderMan^®.

Hair Output

Consider outputting Hair to Paint Effects if you want to:

render with the Maya Software renderer
convert the Paint Effects hair to polygons and render in any renderer

Consider outputting Hair to NURBS curves if you want to:

use the curves for output to another renderer that directly supports curve rendering.
select a few Current Position curves and loft a surface through them with construction history.
extrude a circle down the curve to create a tube.
use the curves as path or control curves for any standard Paint Effects brush, such as feathers or vines. These brushes behave differently than the default built-in Paint Effects as the curves are not the hairs, but controls that interpolate and affect Paint Effects. This scenario is slower to update and takes a bit of time to set up. Alternatively, you could just assign a Paint Effects brush to a hair system (you don’t need NURBS Curves output for this).

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

use both the curves (for example, as particle emitters to simulate spray flying off wet hair) and render using the integrated Paint Effects either directly or by converting to polygons.