Use
Guide and
Linear Wire modifiers to shape and deform hair as well as to drive hair animations or simulations.
Guide and
Linear Wire modifiers can be used for same purposes.
Guide modifiers provide additional control over hair shape using an interpolation method and region maps.
For more information and similarities and differences between these modifiers, see
XGen interactive grooming modifiers.
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Blend
- Specific to the
Guide modifier. Lets you control the range of influence that each guide has on surrounding hairs. Increasing this value enlarges the range-of-influence of each guide, causing their influence on hairs to be an average of neighboring guides.
Adjusting
Blend helps control how the hairs are affected by guide shape, animation, and simulation when you use a Mask and the Magnitude Ramp.
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Smoothness
- Specific to the
Linear Wire modifier. Sets the amount of control each wire has on each hair. When set to 0, hairs are controlled by the nearest wire. Setting the Smoothness to higher values blends the control influence between other wires. The
Breakage attribute controls the falloff of the interpolation from the base to the tip.
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Breakage
- Specific to the
Linear Wire modifier. Controls the falloff of the interpolation by setting a falloff radius along the hairs from base to the tip.
When set to 0, the interpolation is applied smoothly from the base to the tip. Higher
Breakage values increase the amount of influence at the tip, allowing the hairs to pull apart as the control wires separate.
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Reference State
- Specific to the
Linear Wire modifier. Set the rest position of the curves used to animate the hairs.
Input Guide/Wire
Specific to the
Guide and
Linear Wire modifiers.
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Create
- Clicking
Create generates the guides/wires on the surface of the mesh. By default, the density of the guides is 10 percent of the hair density. This also creates a new node network for the guides and wires consisting the following:
- inGuide, sub-description node derived from the main description node.
- Sculpt modifier node that lets you sculpt the guides using the interactive groom tools.
- Scale modifier node that lets you scale the length of the guides.
- inGuide_base node, which controls the generation of the guides.
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Use Selected Curve as Guide/Wire
- Lets you convert selected Maya curves in the scene, from a referenced file, or from an Alembic cache file to guides/wires.
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Make Guides/Wires Dynamic
- Opens the
Make Guides Dynamic Options window, which lets you turn on options for animating the guides/wires using the dynamic curves from an nHair system.
Region Control
Specific to
Guide modifiers.
Region Control
attributes are available after the guides are created on the surface of the mesh object.
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Use Region Map
- Toggles the region map on and off.
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Region Mask
- Controls the effect of the
Region Map. You can assign a painted texture or an existing texture file to this attribute to control where the region map has greater and lesser effect.
A value of 0.0 means the area should ignore region maps while a value of 1.0 means that the maps should be completely respected. Any value between 0.0 and 1.0 results in non-region guides being dampened by that amount. A
Region Mask can be used to fade out the region control. This attribute acts as a multiplier on the
Region Map effect.
For information about creating a mask for this attribute, see
Work with masks.
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Region Map
- Region maps provide a way to override how the guides interpolate the placement and behavior of hairs. Typically, region maps divide the surface of the mesh into distinct regions based on different colors. The guides in each region only control the interpolation of the hairs within the same region. Create a region map by painting a texture file on the bound mesh surface or assigning an existing texture file to the mesh.
Region maps work best when you paint individual colors to define the regions on the mesh. Using a hard-edge brush ensures sharp boundaries between each region. For example, if you want to create a hair part on a scalp mesh, paint one side of the mesh blue and the other side red. The map forces primitives originating in red areas to ignore the guide interpolation in the blue areas and vise versa for primitives in the blue area.
For information about how region maps and guide interpolation, see
Region maps and masks.