Fiber FX - tips and tricks

[Kryslin]

I seem to remember the 3rdPowers people were working on making a couple of their brush tools work on polychains and splines...

[Greenlaw]

Oh, I hope so! I used the 3rd Powers tools frequently and they're top-notch.

[prometheus]

I don´t feel confortable myself talking about blender here once this thread was created to talk about LW FiberFX, sorry. I am trying to get better results using Lightwave because I think hair/fur is much better in 2018-2019. About creating fibers, normally I do that in ZBrush but I don´t have only one way. I edit those zbrush guides directly in modeler if is is necessay, like I did in this Electra character.
I agree about render times. And if you have to use subsurface scattering AND hair/fur together render time can goes forever.

understood..it's your started thread.
further on I will post any blende hair pipeline stuff in another more suitable thread

(Moderator note: thread here, with appropriate posts moved from this thread: https://forums.newtek.com/showthread...ve-and-Blender)

[Greenlaw]

I don´t feel confortable myself talking about blender here once this thread was created to talk about LW FiberFX...

Hi Maurocor,

I can understand your feelings on this. I too would prefer to do it all within LightWave's environment. As a matter of fact, there are compelling reasons for keeping it all inside LightWave, like the automatic generation of UV maps and weights in the guides.

But to me, if there are ways to create guides for FiberFX using other tools (like ZBrush, for example,) it's all relevant. I don't have any real experience with Blender to LightWave so I'm mostly just curious about it right now. I generally like using FiberFX and I'm all for anything that makes it easier and faster to use in production.

That said, I don't wish to hi-jack your thread either and I'll try to keep future posts here to discussing native FiberFX tools and related LightWave plugins. There's plenty to talk about there too.

[prometheus]

I recall Sensei (trueart) did some work with a hair sculpt tool in modeler, It looked promising, but I am not sure if some guys simply didn´t catch on to it..he also worked on a volumetric rendering solution ..but I think all was canceled.
I was mostly interested in the modeling tools for hair there, currently I do not know if 3rd powers has his sculpting tool working nicely on splines, apart from combing, it needs cutting, re-scale new length, add new hair strands, and deflect the strands from the mesh as well as individual control per strand vertices ..without jumping between too many tools.

I think sensei has removed everything regarding that hair modeling tool as well as rendering from his site, or at least I can´t find it.

[Chuck]

I've split off the portion of the discussion not centered on learning and improvement to LightWave's hair and fur tools to it's own thread: https://forums.newtek.com/showthread...ve-and-Blender

A couple of posts appear in both threads, as they seem very relevant to both.

[Greenlaw]

Thanks Chuck! I'll continue the third-party talk over there.

[erikals]

tip, consider turning off Gi for FiberFX to halve the render-time.

[Kryslin]

Sensei's TrueHair (both the renderer portion and the modeler) never got out of beta, it appears.

TrueHair's styling tools included : Extrude Hair, Select Hair Root, Select Hair Tip, Toggle Hair Freeze. Yep, that's it (It still lives on in my 9.6.1 installation).

[prometheus]

tip, consider turning off Gi for FiberFX to halve the render-time.

At least for tweak styling, there comes a point you would probably need GI anyway, or use other types of light, which also will increase rendering time.
Honestly, they need to look in to the renderspeed, it´s not good..even if you compare to a certain other software also using cpu.

[prometheus]

Sensei's TrueHair (both the renderer portion and the modeler) never got out of beta, it appears.

TrueHair's styling tools included : Extrude Hair, Select Hair Root, Select Hair Tip, Toggle Hair Freeze. Yep, that's it (It still lives on in my 9.6.1 installation).

do you use it for styling hair?

[Kryslin]

I never have GI on with FiberFX. Like you said, GI + FFX = Render time measured on the geological scale.

Re Truehair styling tools : I did, for a while. Then, I wrote my own.

[Kryslin]

Here's a question:

On the FiberFX -> Options tab, there's the option "Use UV Map".
While the explanation is rather clear, how you use it is not.

So, how do you use it?

[Greenlaw]

Use it to apply a color texture to the fibers (like tiger stripes, for example.) The UV map needs to be on the geometry the fibers are growing from.

So, if you're using Edit FX, you need to use the UV map of the mesh the guides are attached to.

If you're using externally generated guides (like FiberMesh,) then the UV map needs to be on the root points of the guides. You can transfer the UV coordinates from the character's 'skin' to the root points of the guides using any of the plugins I described earlier. (This is assuming, of course, that the character's 'skin' has a UV map. If not, you'll need to create one.)

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Wait. It's been a while since I used this so I made a quick test to check if I knew what I was talking about. Here's what I found:

In LightWave 2019, I can get the texture to appear with or without the option enabled, so now I'm not sure.



Sorry, don't have time to look into this at this time. Maybe tonight.