Post
by kitsu » Mon Nov 21, 2005 6:52 pm
I spent a few hours this weekend playing with the new hair features and it was as fun as it was frustrating. I grabbed an old model I had planned to use card-style hair on, and tried to get some decent hair/fur using particles. During the process I found a bunch of problems, errors, and inconsistencies that made the task less fun, and in places nearly impossible. I'm going to list some of the problems I had and hopefully someone can let me know which ones are known issues, and which, if any, I should add to the bug tracker.
First off I did get spots in my renders. They where of fixed size (five pixels in an arrow shape), and they were less noticeable at higher resolutions. In fact I only noticed them playing beck an animation of what I had made.
Next I had used the mirror modifier on the model and not only did (static) particles not work with the mirror, but they showed up on the unreal side of the mirror. I had to mirror my mirrored model to get the hair on the side facing the camera!
Related to that: Why does freezing the mirror modifier loose so much information? In my mind all its doing is: Shift-D -> mirror global x -> rem-doubles -> ctrl-n. If the regular mirror command doesn't remove vert groups neither should the modifier.
Next the new particle panels are great, and I see that the misleading multiple system buttons where removed. Unfortunately for me I needed more than one system for my application, one for long hair and one for short. To get around the limitation I just duplicated the mesh, used alt-s to shrink the copy, and added different system to that. The point though is that it would be super nice to have more than one particle system on a mesh.
Last thing: the guides are really cool, but a little odd. For some reason I expected the guides to work like a field, where any particle within a given distance would be pulled along the path with strength = inverse square of distance times some user defined scalars. Really what the guides do is the same as the curve deforms. I guess what I was looking for was a way to comb, a way to regionally control which direction the hair flowed. I think currently the only way to do this is to either create a separate mesh with normals pointed where your hair should go, and/or use a ridiculously large number of curve guides to manually bend the hairs.
Okay, all complaining aside I think the particle system is very nice and moderately usable as it is now. The weighted length and density are very powerful, the curves are useful for a number of applications, the hair looks great (except for the artifacts). I'm sure when Ton gets done this will be one of the most celebrated features in the next version, rivaling even the amazing animation upgrades. I just hope Andy and the guys at Orange keep pushing him to make Blender as good as it can be.
BTW: I pre-ordered the DVD about a month ago, but never got an email about it. I guess the presale ended before I got processed? Anyway I think it would be nice if there where some more ways to financially sponsor the development for Orange.