Control hairs by painting a mask on the mesh

Control where hair appears by painting a density mask

You can block hair from appearing in specific areas of the bound mesh surface by creating a density mask. Density masks are useful for creating hair lines, bald spots, or masking out the hairs in any area of groom.

Note: You can use these workflow to create a mask for the Guide modifier's Region Mask attribute.

1. In the Interactive Groom Editor, select the description_base node.
2. In the Attribute Editor, expand the Generator section.
3. Beside Density Mask, click this icon:.
4. In the Create Map Options window, do the following:
   • Set Size to 2048 or 4096.

     The higher the resolution of the texture file the more accurate the mask.

   • Set Start Color to White or Black.

     When set to White, the initial map value is 1 on the entire mesh so all the hairs appear. Painting black over the white changes the map values from 1 to 0, and stops the hair from appearing in the painted regions. You can also set the Start Color to Black, and then paint white in the areas you want the hairs to appear.

   • Set all other options to the desired settings and click Create.
5. (Optional) In the File Texture section of the 3D Paint Tool settings, turn on Extend seam color to minimize artifacts along the seam.
6. Select black or white for the Color and paint on the mask
   Tip: Before painting, hide the hair by clicking this beside the Description in the Interactive Groom Editor.

Control modifier attributes by painting a mask

You can paint a mask on the mesh to control modifier attribute values. When you assigned a mask to an attribute, it uses the color-based map value as a multiplier for its current value. For example, painting a gray mask on the mesh multiples the attribute in the painted areas by 0.5.

1. In the Interactive Groom Editor, select the modifier.
2. In the Attribute Editor, locate the modifier's Mask attribute.
3. Beside Mask click this icon: .
4. Follow steps 4 to 6 from the Control where hair appears by painting a density mask procedure above. When creating a mask for a modifier attribute, select the Start Color setting that best suits the desired effect. For example, you can set the map start value to current value of the attribute. For more information about Start Color, see Create Map Options.

Related topics

• Create a mask by assigning a texture file
• XGen description_base node attributes
• XGen interactive groom modifier node attributes