[orange]来个理发

You may remember Andy’s some weeks ago about the new static particles. Well, we must say it was a great improvment for static particles, but we thought the possibilities could be pushed, and Ton came out with a bunch of great new options (that led us to have a few late nights playing around with them!).

For the film, we had decided that we wanted our characters to have beleivable yet also stylised haircuts, and after looking over the possibilities, now with the increasing functions of the static particles, we are very confident in using static particles in this case, and particles in general are now a lot more powerful.

Some of the newest additions include…

?C Tangent Shading of particles in 3D View

Now you can see the particles in solid shading!

?C Vertex group and weight paint options

Under some particle options you can set a vertex group (VGroup). One will control Density, and the other length! Using this in conjunction with weight painting you can (In real time!) paint length and density.

?C Curve Guides

This is probably the teams favorite new feature with particles, and our key to making styled haircuts for our characters. One can use curves to guide the hair, using a range of options.

Another cool trick is to add hooks to the curve control handles (CTRL+H with point selected in edit mode). This can allow animation of the guide curves for some interesting effects.

Official release logs can be found

We havn’t as yet mastered the features in the short time they have been implemented, but we began some tests and then started seeing what would happen when applied to a characters head, our first result can be seen in the top image.

From now we look to intergrating the particle hair with texturing and more material techniques. Wish us luck!

More news as it comes.

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