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[Raxx]

I see. It's a good idea, one that I had considered a little in PHUR's early development stages, but the problem with utilizing spline guides in Anim8or is that it's not easy to make them by hand. You have to draw out the spline, then rotate and position them perfectly, and then likely have to tweak them. Most cases would require a dozen or so spline guides to get good results. A full-blown shaggy animal would require a hundred or more.

PHUR is for fur. Not long fur, just short fur. Granted, it can be used for a lot of other things, but not for realistic hair. Before I turn PHUR into something with hair capability (using spline guides), I would rather wait for Steve to implement the creation of splines via ASL first. This way I can generate the spline guides automatically and the user only has to tweak them.

Though I said that, I'll add it to the to-do list anyway. It'll require quite a lot of code modifications, so I won't prioritize it over the other things on the list for now.

[davdud101]

RAXX!!!! This is brilliant! It's like the EXACT THING I needed Mesh2Pt to be!! With even MORE features than I needed!! You're fantastic

[Unobtainium]

Thanks Raxx.
I will have a go at this with some technical stuff in mind that requires lots and lots of jagged or spiky meshes.

Now, if there was a way to know the surface area-to-volume- ratio of the model with PHUR (based on total surface area and bounding-volume), or perhaps several measures of ratios.
Such a feature would be really nice, IMO.

[daniel99]

Wow, I just found this. But I have a little...problem. It works a little too slow for me, and it kinda crashes if I make more than 2hairs/face. I have quadro2000 graphics card and 32gb of memory... So, what can I do?

[Raxx]

Start with a large amount of spacing and relatively few divisions, and then increase those as you get used to the impact the parameters have on the output.

As for kinda crashing, I'm assuming you mean it just takes a bit of time to generate. Anim8or becomes unresponsive when generating a parametric shape, which is what the fur object is. Look at the console window for a progress update, as mentioned in section 8 of the PHUR manual.

[daniel99]

Cool. It will take awhile until I'll master your amazing script and how to get the most realistic looking fur possible. I'm also thinking, would be nice if only the original mesh would need the rigging, so the fur would follow the mesh. When I'm rigging the fur, sometimes it gets stretchy at the knees and elbows.

[Raxx]

Yeah, it's one of the disadvantages of having separate editors in Anim8or. That kind of stuff would be best done in the Scene Editor, but ASL has no mesh generation/editing capabilities in that editor, and probably won't for a long time.

There is a request in the Feature Request Thread, Object Script Controller, that would allow me to make PHUR into a physically dynamic script in the scene editor, but it all depends if Steve adds that feature.

For animation, the best results would be a mix of morph targets and painted weights. This way you can adjust the vertex weights to reduce the stretching.

I created MorphIt specifically to allow animated PHUR via morphs. However it is a pretty inefficient program, so large amounts of PHUR result in very slow loading times and/or crashes...one of these days when I have the time, I'm going to go back and recode both PHUR and MorphIt. I'm positive I can make them perform more than 200% faster with better results.

[daniel99]

You have no ideea how useful your scripts are. I really appreciate you put so much time into it. Thank you.

[dwsel]

Wow, I just found this. But I have a little...problem. It works a little too slow for me, and it kinda crashes if I make more than 2hairs/face. I have quadro2000 graphics card and 32gb of memory... So, what can I do?

Anim8or is still 32bit app - it won't use more than 1,7GB of memory or 3,5GB with Large Address Aware flag. You can set it to be 'on' with this little utility: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/ It should make it less crashy (at least when it comes to out of memory bugs).

[daniel99]

Thanks, dwsel. I've tred that, but unfortunately doesn't feel to render faster. Would be great if Steve will make anim8or to be able to use more memory.
And of course...activate IK.

[Maximilianibus]

Somehow I'm too stupid to use this. Is there maybe a video available?

[Raxx]

Sorry for the late response. Have you read the Getting Started chapter that starts on page 7 of the included manual, and tried the Step-By-Step in there?

[davdud101]

Can you repost the manual, Raxx? I'm digging thru these threads looking for it hehe
[EDIT]: Oop- nevermind! Found it!

[Unobtainium]

Glad you guys are trying it out! I discovered a major bug with the comb thing--I kind of broke it in one of my last minute changes before updating -- I uploaded v1.2a with the fix!

kreator, good to see you stress testing PHUR! 3 and higher reverts to a transmap shape only. I know this causes potential problems with the base mesh, as far as I can tell you have two options: Convert to mesh and apply a transmap material separate from the base mesh, or give the base mesh a huge-scaled planar uv map so that a completely opaque part of the transmap covers all of it. I prefer the latter option unless the base mesh is already unwrapped and needs its own texture.

The same idea applies to geometric fur as well, since you could have potential conflicts if you want to use a texture map on the fur strands (my minotaur uses gradient color maps mixed with some ambient color). You'd have to either convert to mesh or scale the base mesh's UVs to a location on the map that has a suitable color, unless the base mesh looks good enough as is.

The more realistic or in-depth you want the PHUR, the more thoughtful you'll have to be. If you take the time to create a base mesh that you are happy with, and take the time to comb the PHUR how you want it, then there won't be much preventing you from finalizing it by converting it to mesh and then customizing the materials. However(!), if you really like your PHUR and want to back it up just in case, simply copy and paste it and the combs into a separate object before converting the PHUR to mesh and deleting the combs. Like I said before, the .an8 file size imprint is extremely small for parametric shapes, so there's no reason not to.

I know I'm kind of rambling now but I also noticed that Anim8or does its general processing with only one thread. So you need a fast core to reduce the generation time, and more than one core if you don't want to lock up your entire computer until it's done. I'll be emailing Steve a list of ASL requests, and multithreading is going to be one of them.

captaindrewi: I'd forgotten about the more abstract. Good to see you using it in style

johnar, thanks, but I may end up vanishing just like tha- *poof*

Did you guys ever discuss multi-threading in Anim8or? It would be super awesome to at least have basic support for threads in ASL.