Question About character modeling to my fellow modelers....

[CyAn1d3]

question for my fellow modelers

ok, i got a character ive been modeling out, its pretty much done, aside from the mapping and textures, rigging and what not.
but im at a snag.... seems i dont have the memory to render the hair&fur that max can create, so im throwing that out the window.

keeping this in mind, other than making it as a mesh and texturing, whats the BEST possible way to make realistic(ish)
hair?

tis a bit confuzzling to me

[limey BSc.]

Create a plane with the basic shape and a texture with transparency with the detail on.

[CyAn1d3]

Create a plane with the basic shape and a texture with transparency with the detail on.

thanks for the advice! cookie!

what im thinking is cloning the geometry of where the hair is placed and modeling it out, like the top of the skull, and any areas of facial hair and doing the textures like you said, would that work as well? i know its one more thing that i have to put in the hierarchy for any animation, but either way id have to do that.

[King Class Scout]

hair&fur

gwuh?  i just saw the word "fur"...i don't think too many home computers could handle rendering fur of any kind.  is there a certian kitty in the works?

[CyAn1d3]

hair&fur

gwuh?  i just saw the word "fur"...i don't think too many home computers could handle rendering fur of any kind.  is there a certian kitty in the works?

no, its a human character model that im doing, like i said the hair is pretty much all im stuck on.
my laptop CAN actually render the hair.... if thats all that im trying to render, when i made the rest of the character visible and tried to render, i had a memory fault and crashed MAX because the character model is a smoothed high poly mesh.
hence my problem

one other thing, how do i get meshes intended as clothing to react as such in max?
(i.e. trenchcoats that move and conform to movement to be specific)

ill post a render of the model in here later today and change the thread title

[Armondikov]

You have two options:

1) Render in layers to reduce the memory requirements per render. You then composite the image together when you've rendered everything out.

2) Simplify the method you're using to make it simpler and quicker. And there are probably dozens of techniques you can do.

You can get good results using texture mapped hair (you get the same results that you seen on recent in-game CG. You can see it here: http://www.virginmedia.com/microsites/games/slideshow/finalfantasy12/img_21.jpg ) but I find that adding transparency, which is required for that extra realism, ups the rendering time massively, especially if it they cast shadows - your rendering engine needs to calculate how much the light is being retarded by each transparency map and when you have a dozen layers of hair, this is pretty damn awkward for it. And if you don't cast shadows, well, there's no point in the transparency map because the hair won't have the depth and it doesn't look good.

Another option is to go for pure polygonal hair that is extruded by a displacement map, the rendering is made more efficient with Lightwave's APS but I don't know what the equivalent is with Max. Again, the rendering time increases with adding transparency, you're also usually limited to fairly straight hair, but it works great for fur.
You can see my attempt to stretch it out here:

[CyAn1d3]

Another option is to go for pure polygonal hair that is extruded by a displacement map, the rendering is made more efficient with Lightwave's APS but I don't know what the equivalent is with Max. Again, the rendering time increases with adding transparency, you're also usually limited to fairly straight hair, but it works great for fur.
You can see my attempt to stretch it out here:

since the characters hair is spiked, i do beleive im gonna go for that route.

whats a displacement map, and how do i create it?

[Armondikov]

A displacement map is a greyscale image (like a bump map) but physically displaces the polygons, rather than just shading them to give the illusion of depth. The more polygons you have, the more detail the displacement map can have. In the spiked hair example, you basically use an appropriate procedural texture.

I think this is doing something similar in max:

The related videos may also be of some help.

[CyAn1d3]

thats the EXACT modifier that i originally used to start off with, like i said tho, i can render the hair but ONLY the hair, the mesh itself it sooo high poly because of the meshsmooth that it kills my memory.

im thinking of using this method to do the hair, since its just short and spikey, its a LPM meshsmooth method that i used to do the whole character
http://www.3dtotal.com//ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/hair1.php

[ACES_HIGH]

Mesh hair can still look fairly realistic, most of the hair I use in poser is meshed, despite the fact that poser can do individual strands as well.  This for example is a mesh with transmaps.

[CyAn1d3]

alright, ill give it a shot and see what the results look like, its short spikey hair so there really wont be much movement from the hair when it gets animated, just has to follow the characters head