How to create Amazing 3D Hair & Fur in Maya | Yone Santana | Skillshare
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How to create Amazing 3D Hair & Fur in Maya

teacher avatar Yone Santana, Animator & Coach

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Introduction

      5:25

    • 2.

      How XGen Works

      8:14

    • 3.

      Setting up your scene

      8:07

    • 4.

      Brush Settings

      5:56

    • 5.

      Brush Types

      5:44

    • 6.

      Using Modifiers

      8:56

    • 7.

      Using Texture Maps

      6:44

    • 8.

      Class Project

      4:15

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About This Class

Creating stylised and believable hair in 3D has been traditionally technically and artistically challenging. However since Maya 2018 there is a more artist friendly set of tools to make hair. The XGen Interactive Grooming Tools, make creating and styling hair really simple by using a series of interactive grooming tools that you can use in the Maya viewport.

During this class I'll be showing you:

  • The main concepts of how to make hair in Maya
  • How to stylise hair in XGen using interactive brushes
  • Improve the look of your hair by using Modifiers and textures

By the end of this class you will have the confidence to make hair and groom your own fluffy creatures. Feel free to follow me on Skillshare and social media.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Yone Santana

Animator & Coach

Teacher

Hi!

My name is Yone Santana and I’m a freelance animator, currently living and working in the UK. I love sharing the knowledge and skills I have picked up during my career and turning them into easy to follow tutorials. I’ve also had the great fortune of also teaching all things Maya for over 10 years at a university level.

 

You can find me on Twitter and learn more about Maya on my Youtube Channel.

If you want to learn the core skills to become an animator, then you are in the right place.

See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Class Introduction: do you want to add an extra layer of polish to your three D characters by adding care to them? Creating realistic looking for and hair has traditionally been technically challenging very hard for artists to grasp. However, it's never been easier than now to make hair inside of Maya, thanks to the excellent interactive grooving tools Siris of native tools that exist inside of my making hair. And for with no plug ins required for this class, I'm gonna be sharing with you the process of creating for for this cute koala character and how to render out a final image that you can share on your social media platforms. Extra is a tool inside of Maya that was created by Walt Disney Animation Studios for making the half of films like Tangled Frozen or Wreck It. Ralph, I'm gonna be showing you the basics of how to use the X Gen Tools inside of Mile with a practical workflow and the theory of how you can stylized and groove your hair in this class will be covering how to set up your three D scene for X Gen. And some of the do's and dont's of When you're using the tools will then be showing you how you can use the interactive brushes to comb and style eyes your hair within the three D View port, and then I'll be showing you some of the technical tools to refine the look of the Harrison can use modifiers and maps to improve that final look. We'll finish off by creating a small project where we will render out a still image off our hair, and I'm gonna be providing some seen files that you can follow along with. Or if you have a three D character of your own, you can actually design the half of them. So hi, my name's Johnny Anime character animated currently living and working in the UK Most of my work has been in commercials, and now I'm working in the video game industry. Also run a small YouTube channel where I teach people all things about Maya. To complete this class, you will need a computer with a working version of my 2018 or beyond and a two D painting program like photos show. This class is for people who are even animators, graphic designers or creative people who are interested in learning how to create hair for in three D By the end of the class, I hope you have skills to start designing your own furry creatures. So follow me on skill share. You could join the class right now and I'm available to answer any questions you might have on the project of the class through the community page. So what are you waiting for first? That button right now. 2. How XGen Works: for those of you who are completely new, exchange is a hair and grooming system inside of Meyer. It will create hairs by creating thousands of instance copies of an individual strand of hair on place it all over the three D geometry To be efficient. Extends simplifies the way of making realistic looking hair in a few interesting ways. If I was to take a very basic example and zoom into a model here of a kind of riel strand of hair, hair has a complex shape that if I look close up, it looks like a stack of cups all nested in one another. And it's all these ridges that give hair its particular sheen and texture. However, most hair systems will not try to be 100% accurate, and they will simplify things down to a series of guidelines made out of spines and tube like geometry. If I was to mailed a very simple example of what extreme is actually doing under the hood, it would focus on a few things. The full things you need to know when starting to set up exchange is to set up How many hairs Aaron, you're set up the length of your hair. The taper. If it has any end to the CVS, what are these things? Well, density is what controls the overall number of hairs, which are being used in your seen on length is exactly what it says on the tin, how long or short your hair is. Taper is making each end of the hair slightly thinner than the base, and this makes the hair look more translucent at the tip. CVS are a particular thing to exchange in, which is kind of like the polygon subdivisions for the hair. Importantly, I want to point out that if you have too few CVS, you get very jagged looking hair on the more CVS's you have them, or the hair can be wavy or curly. So if you're trying to create a piece of very curly hair, you'll have to have a highest C V count. X Gen will also add a hair shader that will simulate the interaction of light with surface , creating the sheen and shine that hair normally has. But it's rendered through a shading material. Another way of rendering hair out from X chin for games is to render clumps of hair out as a Siris of textured cards, which is some flat planes that have a texture with an Alfa Channel applied to it. I think one of the main insights of looking into X Gen. Was to actually find out that there actually are two different extends Working insight of Maya, and each one of them has their own workspace. I say they're two different x gens because the traditional extend definition and the new exchange interactive tools work in the same way using the same based technology. But you can't mix both systems well in your work, and you need to choose to work with one or with another. Firstly, the original X Gen inside of Mayer was what's called extreme definitions, which is a whole set of tools that allows you to create hair or instance geometry for set dressing. It's a very robust system with loads of tools. You can select any three D object and create a new definition, and we can set up exchanging to create a Siris of grew mobile spines that we can see in our interface, then changing around the initial settings. I can play around with the density which will add more pieces of hair to this plane, and I can also taper off the edges at different points. As my computer system is now showing its age, I need to turn the preview mode of the hair on and off constantly to refresh my changes. I can also change the length of the hair by using the groom tab, where there's a whole host of grooming tools which are very similar to like using stylist brushes to move and style the hair. Now you can notice that I can only groom the yellow guides in my scene, and this makes me have to go a lot of back and forth by turning on the preview mode of the hair and turning it back off. It's one of the original criticisms off extra and what made it complicated for people. There's a lot of weight and see in this workflow and you constantly air kind of not quite sure of what the final look of your hair is actually going to be. One of the other drawbacks of this system was that it had a very steep learning curve because it was very focused on giving people lots of technical tools where you could use textures, expressions, scripting and everything that you could possibly imagine if you were a technical artist. But there is good news that there is now a more artist friendly version of X Chin, and that is the X Gen interactive grooming tools. Now these tools have their limitations because they're a small subset of the extent tools, and they're purely focused on creating either hair for characters or for for characters. I found these tools really fun to learn and quite easy to use, and they also perform very well on most computers. My work station is no longer the most powerful that's around, and it's still performs really well inside the View port. To use the extra interactive tools, you just need to select your base geometry, make sure you're in the right window and go to create interactive groom spines on their Aiken, set up all the basic parameters for X chin. Now, the numbers you put in here are gonna be different, depending on the size of your three D mesh. But you can always make slight adjustments afterwards. The big difference here is that the interface for Extra interactive focuses on using a layer system with stackable modifiers. If you think about software like photo shop with adjustable layers, you can create effects that you can stack one on top of one another or add extra layers for detail. If I select the base layer, I confined properties like the density of the hair and type in a new number or used sliders to reach the look that I want. You'll notice that the View port updates really quickly as the extent interactive grooming tools are using the GPU in my graphics card to create live updates in the top layer, I can find properties like the width of the hair, and I can add the taper later on if I need to. I've got also individual modifiers like scale that will allow me to control the overall length of the hair. Now, I can also motive fight the CVS, but it's important to make all these base changes at the start, if possible. Just as your scene gets more complex and you add more modifiers and layers into your stack , extent might be more unresponsive if you try to readjust these based settings later on. Overall, I did find the exchange was very responsive in creating all the changes that I wanted. But as my scenes got more complex, sometimes there were some things that I just couldn't readjust, and I had to go back and redo sections. So it's good to work in separate layers all the time. By selecting the grooming tools on the shelf, I can start combing the brush, and this works very similar toe other three D sculpting brushes similar to Maya or other sculpting software. Just by dragging on the interface, I can root position each one of the strands of hair on. I get an instant refresh of my view port. So the interactive grooming tools allowing to use a brush based workflow to groom hair inside of Mayan. All these changes have done in the view port and should update on real time, depending on the speed of your computer. It's a much more fun and intuitive set of tools to use in order to explain to artists how to create hair in three D 3. Setting up your scene: So for the groom I'm trying to make, I'm gonna be using the koala Bob rig from just Sobel, which is a really nice core character that could use some for before getting started. One of the things I always do is set up a Maya project because that's gonna have a folder with all the files that mired saves in the background, organized in one place, which is really useful to find the extremophiles and any textures that I might need for the project. Grooms can get quite complex. So it's very important for me to simplify down what I'm doing. And I'm only gonna focus on grooming the face. So I'll go into my outline er and hide away the body geometry and have created a duplicate of the head, which I've removed all the deformities and all the information from the rig, because my thinking at this point in time is to create a groom for the face and then think about how toe animate that with the original rig later on down the line. So I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible because Maya tends to remember everything that you do. So it's nice to think about it in chunks. Another thing I find useful is for the geometry to be medium or high poly, meaning that it's got a large number of subdivisions. If you're objects are very simple. That tends to be some strange results that you might get with X chin, just as a visual example of got two pieces of geometry, one that's at 90 degrees and the other, which has a smooth fall off on a curve. If I apply an X Gen system to each one of thes Polly planes, you'll see that the distribution of the hair is quite even throughout. But extra in has a Siris of properties that allows the hair toe actually collide and interact with the mesh in a very natural way. If the geometry is too low in polygon count, you'll start seeing edges and other areas of the original mash appear through the strands of hair. While with the higher polygon mash, the collide allows the hair to fall over the surface in a much more natural and realistic looking way. So if the surface you're trying to groom is too low, Polly, you might spend a lot of trying trying to cover over these gaps, so it's much more efficient to evaluate how appropriate your mesh is before applying X chin . One of the very useful tricks for controlling where you're emitting your for from is to go into the UV editing tool set and select U V shells to emit hair from a specific part of the head that will avoid me having to sprout hair from areas like the nose, which has no hair on it. One of things that I want to do with this character is to zoom in and make sure that I'm not admitting any hair from his lips, cause that is not what I'm looking for. And I can zoom in and select an edge loop that goes around the mouth by double clicking on an edge in the E V editor or in the view port. And then I can open up the UV tools on the left hand side and choose the cutting so tab and choose cut. If I right click and choose select Shell, I can then move this shell away from the mouth. So I'm not gonna be emitting any for from those specific polygon faces. So either from the UV editor or from the my interface, I can right click and choose a UV shell, which will select both the front and the back of the head. Andi. Then I can come up into the create tab, the extra interactive panel and choose create interactive groom spines. Now I've found some settings for the hair that I want to set up, and I've done this actually, by undoing and redoing this process a few times until I found a good initial value. I've chosen a density of 20 a length of two a wit scale of 0.1 and a C V count of 16 because I want the hair to be slightly fuzzy. So extra Nimitz, a load of hair follicles all across the face. And one of the first things that I like to do is to come into the attributes editor, right. Click on one of little arrows on the site and choose the hair physical shader, which is the texture that I can see in the view port on. I like doing this because I like seeing a hair color that's similar to the color of the animal that I'm working with. just because it leaves me not double guessing. I can come into the root color and the tip color used the eyedropper tool and select a color that is similar to the for. And I might make the route color just a little bit darker than the tip. So after I've selected different scales of gray for the highlight in the glint, I'm gonna have a look at the hair shaded in the view port by turning on the lights and the shadows in the View port in true Blue Peter Fashion have already set up some lights in my scene, which is just some standard spotlights, which will allow me to see the hair shaded as I work. I'm going to come back into the extra interactive panel on I'm gonna hit a little plus button next to the groom folder, and it will expand and show me all the modifiers and settings that are inside my groom currently. So in the base layer, I confined the dense team multiply, which will allow me to, but a value like 0.25 and scaled down the density of how many hairs are inside my scene. So this is a bit extreme cause you can actually see the base of the skull right now. If I come up to the groom shape layer, I can select here the width of the overall hair. So if I drag the slider, I could make it thicker and puffy, like tell or I can make it very thin and fine as well if I go in the opposite direction. The main property I want to play around with here is the taper, which I can do through a value or through these controls, which like a little ramp which changed the width of the hair from the base to the tip, depending on the angle of the curve so you can create that fuzzy, translucent look for the tip of the hair. If I go into this scale, it allows me to change the length so you can make the hair longer for combing and grooming . We can make some fuzzy short stubble as well back in the base layer. I could also find a property to change and rebuild the CVS, but do this with caution. I would always recommend you save before you actually do this because this is one of the things that might cause Meyer to crash. The last thing I want to do is talk about the sculpt layer. These are really important because this is where your brushes and your grooming is done. A handy way of getting familiar with all the brushes is to come up into the modeling toolkit, choose generate, go down to interactive grooming tools and undock the window and you'll have a little list with all the name of the brushes with their icons. You can even see some keyboard shortcuts to select them quickly. By selecting this sculpt lay, you'll see that I'll have a sculpt low to Scotland one, which I can rename to comb, and I can then select my comb brush and actually start doing the initial direction of the hair. Now I'm going to talk more about how brushes work in just a few moments. But it's important that you can separate all the processes into multiple sculpt layers, and that's really useful for keeping control of what you groom is doing. So there's a few things you need to have in mind when setting up your ex Jim Project on. Once you're using the tool remember that there's many panels and different layers, but they're all structured very easily and intuitively, and as soon as you get more familiar with the interface, it starts making a lot more sense on how you have to work with it. 4. Brush Settings: so all the extra in brushes are available both on the shelf, and you can also have them out in this floating panelas. Well, old brushes work through a specific sculpt layer. And even though all the brushes do slightly different things, they do have some common properties, which I think very useful to know about when selecting a brush. It's important to make sure that you swap from the Attributes editor to the Tool Settings panel, and this catches me out absolutely every single time when I'm looking for a property and I just can't find it. Onda brushes work very similar to other Mayan brushes. You'll start off by having a brush size and strength of the effect on that is mapped to the B and M keys in Mayer say, compress down B and drag to change the size of your brush, and you compress em to change the strength of it. Although I find that the M property is really, really, really soft when I try and drag it on the view port, so I tend to prefer using this slider. So when working with brushes, I tend tohave the collide with measures. Options turned on This creates a small barrier that you concert, a value to, which avoids the hair intersecting with the base geometry just by combing by making various strokes with a brush, you can see that everything stops a Pacific level that is just a few pixels away from the based geometry. However, if I turn the Clyde option off, this will affect all the head down to the root and can help me smooth out some areas. But I still have to be careful, because if I push the head too much, I can push strands of hair right through the geometry. It is going to give a very unnatural look, and it's gonna be a bit hard to fix it later on. You might have to go in with the grab brush and spend a lot of trying trying to fix this. So best used the Collide option to start off with. I'll quickly undo all those settings and show you the brush Fall off panel. Now, if you're familiar with photo shop, you should be aware that there are hard brushes on soft brushes on. This is exactly the same thing, except that my uses a profile curve that works from the center outwards from left to right here so I can define how soft or how hard the edges of my brush actually are. There are a series of default profile curves allow you to quickly change the type of brush where you can have one where the center is very hard and it feathers out just by the steep curve over here. If I paint on the surface, you're going to see that the effect of the brush is much more in the middle of the actual brushstroke. If, however, I switch to this flat profile curve, the brush has the same strength all the way from the middle, right to the edge. And if I stroke on the surface there, you're going to see that all the hairs are effective and I've got a very hard fall off. So for that initial come, I find that having a very wide brush with a very short fall off is one of my favorites because it allows me to interact with a lot of the hairs on the surface, and I can get kind of like a very quick comb done. I'll undo all of the's settings and go into the root to tip magnitude control. And this is a property that's unique toe exchange, because exchange can choose which part of the hair is effective by the brush strokes. And again it's using this idea of profile curves. Except it's creating a model where, from left to right of this curve, it's representing the base of the hair all the way to the tip of the hair. So as I come away, you can see that I'm moving the tip of the hair much further than the base. If I use this flat profile curve, you're going to see that I effect all the parts of the hair as I paint, and whether I'm painting the route or the tip, it's always moving the same amount. Now. These profiles can also be customized and saved, so I can create a whole range of curve profiles if I so choose to and I can make something like having a big bulge in the middle will allow me to work on the volume of the hair because it's only going to affect the middle of the hair and leave the tip in the base in the same place. It's very good for kind of like adding extra way venous or curl to a hair groom right at the bottom of the list. We have the symmetry property, which can really help you speed up your workflow. You can turn on the symmetry to match the world X coordinate, and everything you do on the left hand side will match the right hand side of your object. The symmetry tools are also available. If you right, click on the view port and right at the bottom. You also have all the symmetry settings. If your object is not aligned to the world coordinates, you can also use the local objects X Y C planes as well. And this works exactly the same as any other tool in mire that has symmetry. Whatever you do on one side of the object is mirrored over to the other. Now there is a final property that's worthwhile, knowing if I right click, there's a property called filter back faces, and this property is always important. Toe have turned on because if this property is not on when you paint on one side of an object, you'll actually be grooming the other side of the object as well. This is not normally a design defect, but this tool is very useful when you're actually working in silhouette, where you congrats multiple strands of hair at different points and groomed thumb into specific shapes. So remember, for that initial groom, make sure that you've got filter back faces turned on. 5. Brush Types: Now we've come to the real fund part of X Gen. And if you walk away with anything today, it's at least to give the interactive brushes a go. Now I'm not gonna cover every single brush that's available and extend, but just the main ones that I'm going to use for a quick demo. Now we've used the comb brush before, and what comb brush does is that it takes the hair and changes its direction and helps to blend the hairs together along the direction of your brush strokes. Now, this is normally used to create the initial shape of the groom, and normally you work from a very wide brush and then narrow it down to make some subtle details with a thin a brush. Later, Ron, remember to change the profile of the magnitude curve on That way, you can affect more hairs, either at the tip level or at the root level. Now all the brushes have different settings, so be careful when you're swapping between brushes, cause things like symmetry, size and the intensity of each brush can be different. As you go working with the multiple tools, the part brush pushes the hairs away from one another, like using an actual comb and parting your hair from one side to another. This could help you localize the direction of hairs and certain places, but it still needs a good magnitude shaped curve to affect the root. And over here I've flattened the hair just a bit way too much, so the result is bit hard to see. You can add a sculpt layer by going up into the ad, sculpt layer button and create as many sculpt lasers you need for different parts of the groom. I tried to work with either one brush will toe work for with a specific effect in mind per layer and keep everything separated cause the same Zen Photoshopped multiple layers can create an overall result. Now the best bit of advice that I received while learning exchange was depressed. The edit button until it highlights red, because unfortunately, you can select the layer and it will highlight blue. But you're actually not sculpting anything on it. Only the lead has the red button. Active, actually, is the layer that you're painting in. So if you make a mistake, undo but don't realize this too late. The grab brush moves the hair within the radius of your brush in the direction of your brush strokes. You can also turn off preserve length, which is a property that the grab brush has, and it allows you to grab and stretch the hair outwards. This would change the length of the hair, but it will also stretch the hair like a piece of chewing gum. And if you've got anything that's curly, it will actually straighten it out. The freeze brushes one of my favorite brushes because it locks any clumps of hair that you planed with this blue outline so that those areas can't be affected by any of the other grooming brushes. It's kind of like using a three D mask from photo shop, but you can optimize how you freeze large areas on your model by painting one side of the groom and the freeze brush has a button which inverts the brush. This could be a real time saver by painting on the small areas that I want to work on and then inverting the brush to freeze everything else. With this area frozen, let me show you how the lengthened brush works. This is a local scaling brush that piers within the radius of your brush size. This could be used to lengthen or shorten the hair in a located area on the brush works by setting a target length between two values, a minimum and a maximum, and then it has an increment value that will change the size of the hair by that amount. In between those two specific values, let me show you what happens if I want to shorten the other side of the hair. I'll invert the freeze by going back to the freeze brush and selecting its custom setting invert freeze. And then I'll come back to the lengthen brush again to shorten the hair again. I've got to set this minimum a maximum value, and then I'll choose the increment to be a negative value. So with each brush, strokes are making the hair shorter by that specific amount. When I started using this brush, sometimes I couldn't see the effect it was taking. But that was because the minimum hair length I had selected was exactly the same as the current size of my hair. So just wasn't doing anything because it had already reached its minimum value. Remember to look at these values in context and always that you're working between the minimum and the maximum now sculpt layers. A really useful, and we gotta remember that sculpt layer at a top level is a modifier, and it's got its own little sculpt underneath. You can turn your layers on and off by clicking on the little circular button on the left, and you can use the slider to change the overall weight of the layer, making it less stronger or blending it between different layers. This system is very powerful and allows you to build your own looks and allows you to have a great level of experimentation. That's only a small selection of brushes that I'm explaining, but hopefully you can start seeing the potential of the workflow. The My help file actually has a detailed description of all the interactive brushes and a detailed explanation of what each one of them does. If you're struggling to see the effect of a brush, I recommend you go to the help file and actually look up what's happening. It might be that there's a setting that's missing, so have fun style izing and creating your initial groom by using a combination of brushes. Be sure to follow reference as you go working on. The initial stages are just to create the flow and direction of the hair and then add small little fixes where you think you need. You might need to use the grab brush to fix certain areas. Or, if you want to add specific lengths or detail, you can come in and very, very, very gently. Just customized certain areas until you find the look. That's OK. As always, work very broad and then go into the detail. 6. Using Modifiers: after completing the initial brushing and settling on a look with the sculpt layers, it's time to add some modifiers. Modifiers create overall effects to the whole look of the groom. If you're familiar with programs like Three DS, max or Blend, you should be familiar with a modifier stack, which is a list of effects that you compile on one another to create different looks. It's important to know that the order of the modifiers can influence the final look and modifies can be moved up and down in the stack and turned on and off. So it's a very attrited and very easy to use workflow that allows you to change things with ease because three order of the stack is important. Some operations like, for example, scale that we said at the beginning. It's actually safer to create a second scale operation. If you want to change the length of the hair at a later time by adding a second scale operation, you contest if the groom would look better being shorter or longer. And don't worry if you make mistakes because you can always right click on a modify aware and just delete it. Now I'm only going to cover three of the main modifies that I used to create the final look for this for, But you're going to see that just by adding them and experimenting with, um, it's very easy to find out what each one of them does. One of the first things I wanted to break away from was having this very smooth looking hair. So what I wanted to do, first of all, was go and add a displacement modifier. Now the displacement modifier is gonna add some irregularity to the positioning of the hair , and it's important that when you turn it on, nothing happens to start off with because, like displacement in text oring, it runs off. Using a texture in this case has got a handy property, which is called displacement, and I'm going to go ahead and look for a simple Meyer noise texture in the stack. Now, as soon as I add, this is, create some irregularity to the surface of the groom, which is exactly what I want, but currently it's just a bit too blocky. What I need to do is go into the properties of the noise texture and look for a probably court frequency by turning the frequency all the way up. It's going to create mawr irregularity on the surface of the texture, and that's gonna spread out all of the hairs now modify less can be tackled on and off so you can see the before and after result very easily. And I'll have to navigate back into the texture on. Look for some more properties to play around with because currently that has a bit too extreme and pointing upwards to make the effect a little bit smoother. I'm gonna reduce the properties for the threshold and the amplitude to make the noise color a bit more gray and the gray of the color, the more it will mask the effect of displacement. Now, it's perfectly fine to exaggerate your properties and to take them as far as you possibly can go. If you take it to the point where it just looks a little bit ridiculous, you can then come back into the displacement properties and look for a property called scale. And as you pushed down on the slider, you're going to see that this is going to reduce the overall effect of the lair. You can feel free to reduce it 60% 50%. Whatever looks good in the view port, the next modifier I want to talk about is noise. A noise is a great way of adding either curls or irregularity to the positioning of the hair. As I add the noise modify, you're going to notice that the hair instantly becomes a little bit more wavy. There are some properties here as well, which we need to play around with which one of the most important ones is the frequency, which lets me set how curly the hair actually is. If I use a low frequency value, the hair is going to be straighter. But it can still have noise because there's another property called magnitude, which controls how large the dips and rises are in the frequency. Or if there's no frequency at all, it will just position the hair at different angles again, creating a noise effect in the hair. If I use the Correlation property, it's going to group the hair a little bit and make it a bit more consistent. Now it's important that while I'm doing this on my second monitor, I'm looking at reference as well, and I'm trying to look for the right settings for the groom, for the frequency. Try not to imagine things when you're working all the time, because I get confused very easily, and I think that I'm creating something that looks like call affair, where really I'm imagining it. So it's always good to have reference right on hand to look at what I'm doing. And I can find this a little bit hard to do because I'm really looking at just one effect that the hair actually has, and I'm trying to match it. So I'm trying not to do it straight away and get it right perfectly. I'll tweak the settings loads of times again. If I take things too far with noise, I can always grab the property called Mask and turn the slider down to lower the overall effect. Lastly, I want to talk about the clump modifier, which, when you add it on, it always looks absolutely terrible because the settings aren't set and clump is very much like the hair gel of X Gen. It's used for making the hair look a little bit spiky and clumped together. So if you're making enemy characters. Probably Clump is your best friend. Now the first thing we want to control is how many clumps there are inside the overall for if you go to a property court density, you can choose how many overall clumps there are or over the firm. By lowering Thea amount, you will see that he starts looking a bit more like quilt. And if we boost this up, there's gonna be many more smaller spikes all over the for which is something that I'm looking for. But I'm gonna have to tweak it. So I get this right balance of how many clumps I need now. The important thing about clumps is that they don't have to look like little spikes. That's only their initial look playing around with the clumping, which is the overall effect of the clump, and it really just opens and closes The tips of those clump points up. This property can also be controlled via a control curve in the clumping scale property. Now, the big advantage of this is that you can choose how thick the bases and how thick the tip is, and the curve can actually be customized as well with other points as well. It's important to remember, or these curves are always again from left to right, affecting the base of the hair or the tip of the hair. So I'll find a position for these curves, which I find appropriate in the view port. And then I'll set about playing around with some of the other clumping properties. Now clumping has a lot of properties that we can use. And one of the things that I found frustrating at the start was that not all of these properties have an initial state properties like offset have a little bit of a curve that suggested to them. So when you move the slider you see in effect, but other properties like Curl have no effect when you move the slider. It all, and it really isn't until you come down to the control curve panel, which is a few sections down that when you change that property, all of a sudden you'll start seeing the effect of Curl coming in. But the slider and the control curve need to be adjusted at the same time. It's just a little bit uncomfortable that they're kind of like in two separate places But that also is due to the fact that I'm using a much smaller version of the Attributes editor . So in summary, by adding modifiers, you can change the overall look of the for by stacking many different modifiers. You can even add multiple stacks of the same modifier, except that every modify will have slightly different settings to clumps. Three noises and just varying. All those settings together can help you have a very fine control off the final look. Also remember that it's very easy to actually change how intense each modifier is applied because they all have some form of Leia masking or similar to a passivity and photo shop, where you can turn the overall effect of the modifier down. 7. Using Texture Maps: you may have noticed that next to most properties inside of exchange, there's a small check, a pattern, which means that that property can be controlled via a texture map. Now in mud box of created a black and white image with various grayscale blobs. So if I save this scene out and I bring it into Maya into a small test scene, I can start looking at different effects that the texture will have, but only on the main modifiers. I'm going to start off by looking at the scale modifier, and I am going to look for its mask property and I'll click on the check of patent and navigate to where I saved the image from mud books. And instantly I can start seeing the effect of the scale plus the texture. We can see that all the areas that were painted black have a value of zero, so that means that there is no length to the scale and it looks like there's no hair there at all. While everything that was painted white has a full value or value of one, and we can see the lair at its full length. So all of the grayscale blobs, depending of their intensity from white to black, will create longer hair or short hair completely, depending on the color. To remove the texture from the modifier, I'll navigate to the mask, property and right click on the word mask and choose Break Connection. So let's go ahead and at a clump modifier and see what happens with the textures. Now, first of all, I need to increase the density cause there's too few clumps by default. So put it upto a value that's good for testing. And then I'll go looking for the mask property, and I'll apply the mud box texture here as well. Now we can see that at a full value, the clumps will appear on everything that was colored white. Everything that's black will be devoid off clumps, so it's important that anything that's in the gray scale will have a more overall effect. OFC, lumpiness or less effect of the clump layer on again. This is the overall effect. All the properties you added into the clump modifier would be masked by this layer. So let me right click on the mosque property again and break its connection. This time, let's look at a noise modifier. So I'm gonna add the noise and then again, look for the mask property and apply the textures we've done before. We can again see that it very much follows a logical pattern in the areas which have painted white. We can see that the noise is appearing, and in the areas which pair black, we can see that there is no noise there at all. So this is a very good way of being able to protect certain parts off the mash to create the groom toe, have different looks without being dependent on whether polygons are placed or if an overall effect is overriding everything. So I want the chin of the quality be less furry than the rest of the groom. So back in mud box, I'm going to paint a map where most of the characters painted white, and I'm going to focus on painting a dark color on his chin. I'll select some few colors, and then I'm going to blur out the edges and just make sure that my chin is set to 20% gray , so it has 20% of the length of the scale. Then, if I save this image out and come back into Maya. I'll look at the original scale modifier from my groom and I'll look for the mask property . When I apply the texture, I can see that there's a visible cut around the chin. And also later on, I added a another painting as well for the eyes as well. So you'll see a cut out there as well to refine the look of the chin further. I'm gonna add another sculpt layer and start using some different brushes to refine the cut . Even mawr. What I'm gonna do is freeze the bottom lip by using the freeze brush, which will appear blue on the screen. And then I'm going to select the cut brush and set a minimum length to as low as it will go . I'm gonna gently trim the mustache area on. I'm not really gonna worry if I go a little bit too far over. I want to be able to see the line of the lips quite clearly. And then I'm gonna use this scope. Play it. Bring the intensity of that cut down until the overall effect looks nice. Ah, fish off by showing you the effect of all the other layers that I added to create this initial groom, and I will say that this is in no way finished or a fantastic groom. But it's heading enough in the right direction that I can go ahead and make a test render. So what I did was I added an additional sculpt layer where I played around a little bit with the length of the for around the eyes and the chin. Andi I trimmed it down and made it just a little bit more readable. So the mouth is clear, added some more noise to create a little bit more curly nous to tips of the hair. And then I also added a little bit of an adjustment to the length of the hair just cause I thought that I was losing the original shape of geometry with so much for, so just by trimming it down with scale tool by just 20% it made the overall shape. He asked a little bit better. I made a separate groom for the years and actually using here a base texture for the color of the hair shader so you can see the pink in the ears as well. Now, unfortunately, I'd like to show you the layers that I used for this as well. But this stack is currently not working, and this is another of those X gen mishaps, which is currently stopping me from making any more changes because as I turn, the modifiers on and off or change the properties is just locked into those settings, so I'm happy to redo them in the future. And that's just one of the bad things about three D that sometimes things just don't work and you have to redo them. So the biggest power of these control maps is toe added complexity to the groom, and it allows you to mix and match different properties in different areas, which makes the for look much more believable and realistic as it can mimic things that we can see in natural reference that we have 8. Class Project: Okay, so it's project time. Now is a good time to put in practice all the skills you have learned so far, and I recommend you go online and you look at some animal reference images so you can see for on the real world conditions and get inspired for what you might want to make. Then you could go to the Scotia page, and if you want to, you can download the Project scene file, which is available there, or you can use your own three D character. If you have one available, you're going to start creating and start analyzing your for, and we're gonna render it out. Using the Arnold. Render Incheon an upload, a screenshot or Orender to the community page for people to see to finish off. Rendering the groom is actually quite easy. Using the Arnold renderers on the default shader settings from X Gen. Everything looks fairly well. You could just add a light into your scene and you're ready to go, however, to make things look a little bit better. What I did was I added a SkyDome light with an HDR as part of my standard set up using the's standard hair shader, although possibly in future. I'd like to try out the Arnold hair Shader as well, which also exists within Maya. But that's for another time on all the lights, which are in my seen a really easy. They're completely available through Arnold. It's just the SkyDome light, with some area lights doing a very simple three point lighting set up. The only thing that was a little customization that's optional is to go into each one of the groom descriptions Andi look for in their shape node for the Arnold tab and choose a maximum pixel width of 0.5. And to make sure that the render mode is set onto ribbon just so that the surrender makes the hair a little bit softer. The lights have set up in a very simple way where I have the main key light actually coming from the HDR, which is the son in that image, and I made a small fill light with an aerial light from Arnold and a place that just to fill in the shadows on the right hand side of the faced. Then I placed to blue lights, which were behind the character. I just made sure that that they were at an angle where they could really pick up the edges of the hairline. It's just important to check that each one of the lights is actually adding and contributing to the actual look of the final image just to make sure that it's not blown out or over exposed. So a lot of times you need to be doing little test renders and looking at certain regions just to make sure that you still see some color in the hair. Once. All the test renders a complete have boosted up the render settings following just a anti alias ing setting of four increasing the Speculative Dept. Of three, and then went down into the ray depth settings and boosted thes speculative four on increased the transparency depth to 25. Hopefully, this will enhance the look of the shiny nous of the hair, and also, as the hair is slightly translucent, it should have a little bit of light absorbed into it, and those ridges should look quite nice. When the renders complete, you can go into the file and choose save image as, and you can choose a name for your image and add which ever extension you like J, Peg P and G E X R and Arnold would just save a file out with the extension that you need. You can also use the render set up window, and that will save the image directly into your project folder with the rendered three D image. Now's a good time toe. Upload it to the community page and either get some feedback from me or just show off the work that you've actually done. If you're struggling with lighting or rendering, I'm gonna leave some links to some video tutorials that will help you give you guys more of a background on how to render things inside of Arnold. Or you can ask me questions directly through the community page. Thanks very much for taking the class. I hope you're now a little bit more confident at creating your own furry creatures inside of Maya. I can't wait to see what you come up with in the project page, and I will be looking forward to see you in some of my future skill share classes. Until then, take care, thank you very much and leave a review if you can. But by