Modifying hair attributes

Learning Resources > Tutorials > Getting Started with Maya > Hair > Lesson 1: Creating a basic hairstyle >

You can modify the hair as a whole by modifying the hair system attributes. You can modify the look of individual hairs or clumps of hair by editing their follicle attributes. In the next steps, you modify various hair system attributes to make Marion’s hair look fuller and more realistic. Then you add curl to Marion’s hair.

To modify the thickness of the hair all over

To select the hair system, drag around the hair curves and select Hair > Convert Selection > to Hair Systems.
Go to the Clump and Hair Shape section in the hairSystemShape1 tab of the Attribute Editor and adjust the following:
- Hairs Per Clump to 30, which controls the number of hairs per curve (hair clump). Increasing the number of Hairs Per Clump increases the rendering time.
- Sub Segments to 2, which adds this many points between segments/points and helps to smooth the hair curves.
- Thinning to 0.5, which controls how much the hair thins out from root to tip.
- Clump Width to 0.3, which controls the width of the hair clump from root to tip. To further modify the hair clump width, you could adjust the Clump Width Scale attribute, which allows you to vary the width along the hair from root to tip.
- Hair Width to 0.02, which controls the width of each hair.
Click the Render Current Frame button to render the hair to see the changes you’ve made to the hair.

To make hair curly

With the hair system still selected, go to the Displacements section in the hairSystemShape1 tab of the Attribute Editor and set the following:
- Curl to 1, which is the amount of curl displacement applied to each hair. The amount of displacement is relative to the hair width.
- Curl Frequency to 15, which is the rate of curl. The higher the value is, the more curls there are.
Click the Render Current Frame button to render the hair to see the changes you’ve made to the hair.