Splitting a hair

After much hair pulling over artifacts showing up in the few strands of hair being used as seaweed, it hit me that this stuff is designed to be used en masse with other similar colored strands so it may cut corners on color rendition.  So i dumped the whole idea of using maya Hair products and just swapped out some paint effects brushes set up to resemble hair.  Still have to brush them in right but nevertheless moving on.

Oxymoronish

A wee distraction trying out toon shading in maya. This may come in handy on another project, but it makes me happy because i was trying to do this another way and it got very, very, very unpleasant.

 Basically it's a render of the outlines only, with a wiggle to the outline. It suggests a handdrawn animation, but with 3d drawing so it's kind of oxymoronish.
A movie sample is here.

Paint Effects Hair

After 'wrassling' , as my grandfather used to say, paint effects hair for a day, I've opted for the cheesy solution, render out separately and then composite the images back in at the required opacity. I tried to save some processing power by limiting the damn  hair to just a patch nearby but this becomes way obvious and I'll have to do it once again. Tomorrow.

Render Farmers Note

Gearing up for a good summer batch of render crops here. I'll be posting a few images from "The Hungering Deep" as they start to come in. Good rainy days needed. My old G5 is clunking along at a reliable if unimpressive pace. Brother Steve's speedy machine will take on some of the more challenging rendering.

Working on hair this morning. Resisting the temptation to get too far into the technical details of virtual hair. Now hair as seaweed.