Maxwell Render

1)

I can't seem to get Maya Fur to work at all. I suspect it's not possible, but

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/ma ... ir+and+Fur

says:

It is important to note that MaxwellHair.mxx is not a fur/hair generator. It reads the fibers provided by a fur/hair generator (like Shave&Haircut, Maya Fur, Ornatrix, Softimage Hair, etc) and allows them to be rendered by Maxwell Render.

I assume the reference to fur is a typo

2)

When I design a NURBS curve and attach a paint effects stroke I can get Maxwell to render it as a hair. I can't figure out how to give the hair 'cone' more than one radius. It's always a cylinder.

3)

The Shave and a Haircut thing is a mess.

I spent something like $600 getting Shave 6 for Maya 2012. When the new Maxwell plugin came out I finallt upgraded to Maya 2013 and consequently seem to have lost Shave. There is no Shave for Maya 2013.

Yes, it was a typo, I've fixed it now.



Expand the "Pressure Mappings" rollup on the stroke, set pressure map 1 to "width" and use the graph control to set two control points, one for root width and one for tip width. The curve will scale the width set in the brush node. Alternatively, you can set the brush node to create tubes and use the width scale controls in the Tubes rollup.



Yeah, they're usually pretty slow to catch up to the latest Maya release, I don't know why. They'll release a build with support for 2013 eventually.

Works fine on the Maya side but the Maxwell hair vanishes (except for one dot at one end) in the Maxwell render side as soon as I change pressure 1 mapping to width.


Works, but I get a 'thorns on a vine' effect along the stroke instead of one long hair from the stroke. Is this expected behavior?

Make sure you're not making the root thinner than the tip. Maxwell hair has this limitation at the moment, it can't render fibers which get thicker towards the tip. I've uploaded a scene file here which shows a stroke with pressure mapping for width.



Yeah, in that case the stroke acts as a generator curve and the tubes grow from it.

Great. Thanks.

So I should not use a wacom pen to try and build pressure variation into the stroke because while Maya sees the entire mapping, Maxwell only sees the t=0 and t=1 radii and the first has to be larger than the second.

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And I see I can convert paint effects to polygons and render the shape as polygons as a possibility.