Joe Alter Shave and a Haircut is a plugin for Maya, that creates extra realistic hair and fur surfaces. With this, you can create furry animals, grasses, haircuts, mustaches and so on. And this is not only about extra rendering-realistic, but also extra dynamic-realistic hair/fur. Combining advantages from both Maya Fur and Maya Hair modules inside itself, JA S&H is a perfect decision for your production. It makes creating of haircuts much easier with much finer level of control and much less rendering time. S&H also MentalRay- and RenderMan-compatible, so you can create super-photorealistic renderings using with no additional compositing.
- Texture Home Page - http://www.joealter.com/
Most all of Shave's parameters respond to texture maps, (including dynamics properties). This can be very useful for increasing realism. They also respond to solid textures. There are no shader networks to create or attach, just dial the params and assign texture like any other Maya surface.
- Combing
In addition to texturing, Shave and a Haircut controls hair with several types of guides. From the moment you grow hair, you're ready to start working. There is no setup to do before you can start getting visual results. Included in the plugin is an interactive combing suite of tools inside the Maya viewports and AE's
You can also save off Maya presets (we render a preview for you), and even hairstyles and apply them to new objects, regardless of topology or UVs.
- Rendering
In addition to supporting various renders like Vray, Renderman, Mentalray and Arnold, which all have hair primitives, we also support the Maya render, which has no hair primitives. To do this we've written our own advanced multi-threaded render which we integrate with your maya scene's own buffers automatically.
We also do some pretty cool stuff with voxels for the other renders which lets you render millions and millions of hairs with far less memory.
Our shader, the same shader for all of the renders, is a simplified version of Marschner paper with primary and secondary highlights, but easier to set up (no refraction index). For GI renders, all light modes are supported.
- Rigging/Dynamics
There is very little to rig with Shave. Surface grown hairs just follow the surface dynamically, you can even preview the dynamics by turning on live mode and shaking it around while you adjust parameters.
Maya's dynamic forces affect shave guides directly, just re-run the cache.
We also have several different kinds of animation constraints that you can apply to any vertex on the chains.
- Simplicity
Shave's interface is so simple and intuitive, you'll spend more time setting up your license than you will setting up your first scene.
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