Hair With Xgen Interactive Grooming Tools - Maya Labs Ep.01

Hello welcome to mile labs if you're new to the channel. This is a video series where I go out of my comfort zone and create a 3d project where I am not the expert, and I try to share some of my learning process with all of you guys for this episode, I'm going to be using the extant Interactive grooming tools to create some fur and hair for the wonderful koala Bob rig by just sobel. This video would not be possible without the help of Juan Pablo Martinez and his fantastic extreme course in domestic cat, which I'm gon na leave. A link to in the show notes below it's a fantastic course with over 4 hours, long of great extreme material, but it is in Spanish and although the course does have some English translations, which are really good for the technical side of Maya. My only critique is that some of Kwan Powell's enthusiasm and his colloquialisms get slightly lost in translation. This isn't sponsored show, but from Paulo such a sweetheart that he actually answered some of my questions on the forum, and for that I really want to give him a big, big big. Thank YOU cuz. It really helped make this video. This is a longer video series and, if you want to speed along, you can check out the table of contents in the comment section below I'm going at a slower pace. Just to show you guys in a little bit more detail. Some of the theories and workflows of how to use x-gen and the things that I discovered while I was trying to learn the software again. This is from the point of view of an enthusiastic amateur, because I'm not a professional groomer at all. So as this is the first video in the new series, I also want you guys to give me some feedback of what you think about Maya labs and if it's something that's interesting for you guys and how we can make the content more engaging as I've produce. More videos in the next coming year, for those of you who are completely new x-gen, is a hair and grooming system inside of Maya. It will create hairs by creating thousands, of instance, copies of an individual strand of hair and place it all over. The 3d geometry to be efficient, x-gen 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 real 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 a hundred percent accurate and they will simplify things down to a series of guidelines made out of splines and tube. Like geometry, if I was to melt a very simple example of what x-gen is actually doing under the hood, it would focus on a few things. The four things you need to know when starting to set up x-gen is to set up how many hairs are in your set up the length of your hair, the taper, if it has any and the Seavey's. What are these things well density is what controls the overall number of hairs, which are being used in your scene and 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. The Seavey's are a particular thing to x-gen, which is kind of like the polygon subdivisions for the hair. Importantly, I'd want to point out that if you have too few Seavey's, you get very jagged looking hair and the more Seavey's you have, the more 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 higher cv count. X-Gen will also add a hair shader that will simulate the interaction of light with the surface, creating the sheen and shine that heron normally has, but its rendered through a shading material. Another way of rendering hair out from x-gen for games is to render clumps of hair out as a series of textured cards, which has some flat planes that have a texture with an alpha 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 x, gens working inside of maya and each one of them has their own workspace. I say they're two different x Jones, because the traditional x-gen definition and the new exchange interactive tools work in the same way using the same base technology, but you can't mix both systems while you're working you need to choose to work with one or with another. Firstly, the original x-gen inside of Maya is, 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 3d object and create a new definition, and we can set up x-gen to create a series of GRU mobile splines 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 cannotice 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. Half it's one of the original criticisms of x-gen and what made it complicated for people. There'S a lot of wait and see in this workflow and you constantly are 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-gen, and that is the x-gen interactive grooming tools. Now these tools have their limitation because they're a small subset of the x-gen tools and they're purely focused on creating either hair for characters or fur 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 workstation is no longer the most powerful that's around and it still performs really well inside the viewport to use the excellent interactive tools. You just need to select your base, geometry, make sure you're in the right window and go to create interactive, groom, splines and there. I can set up all the basic parameters for x-gen now the numbers you put in here are going to be different depending on the size of your 3d mesh, but you can always make slight adjustments afterwards. The big difference here is that the interface for x-gen interactive focuses on using a layer system with stackable modifiers. If you think about software, like Photoshop 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 can find properties like the density of the hair and type in a new number or use the sliders to reach the look that I want. You'Ll notice that the viewport updates really quickly as the x-gen interactive grooming tools are using. The GPU and 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 modify it the Seavey's, 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, x-gen might be more unresponsive. If you try to readjust these base settings later on, overall, I did find that extern was very responsive in creating all the changes that I, 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 to other 3d sculpting brushes, similar to Maya or other sculpting software. Just by dragging on the interface, I can reposition each one of the strands of hair and I get an instant refresh of my viewport. So the interactive grooming tools allow you to use a brush based workflow to groom hair inside of Maya. All these changes are done in the viewport 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 3d. So for the groom I'm trying to make I'm gon na be using the Koala Bob rig from jaws so Gore, which is a really nice cool character that could use some fur before getting started. One of the things I always do is set up a Maya project, because that's gon na have a folder with all the files that Myatt saves in the background organized in one place, which is really useful to find the x-gen files 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 gon na focus on grooming the face so I'll go into my outliner and hide away. The body geometry and I've created a duplicate of the head, which I've removed all the deformers 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 to 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 a tree to be medium or high poly, meaning that it's got a large number of subdivisions. If your objects are very simple, there tends to be some strange results that you might get with x-gen, just as a visual example. I'Ve 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 extern system to each one of these poly planes, you'll see that the distribution of the hair is quite even throughout, but x-gen has a series of properties that allows the hair to 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 mesh appear through the strands of hair, while with the higher polygon mesh, 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 poly, you might spend a lot of try and trying to cover over these gaps. So it's much more efficient to evaluate how appropriate your mesh is before applying x-gen. One of the very useful tricks for controlling where you're omitting your fur from, is to go into the UV, editing tool, set and select UV shells to omit 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 the things that I want to do with this character is to zoom in and make sure that I'm not emitting any hair from his lips, because 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 UV editor or in the viewport, and then I can open up the UV tools on the left hand, side and choose the cut and sew 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 going to be emitting any fur from those specific polygon faces so either from the UV editor or from the Maya interface. I can right-click and choose a UV shell, which will select both the front and the back of the head, and then I can come up into the create tab. The extra interactive panel and choose create interactive groomed splines. 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 2, a width scale of 0.1 and a CV count of 16, because I want the hair to be slightly fuzzy, so x-gen emits a load of hair follicles. All across the face - and one of the first things I like to do - is to come into the attribute editor right: click on one of the little arrows on the side and choose the hair physical shader, which is the texture that I can see in the viewport And 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 use the eyedropper tool and select a color that is similar to the fur and I might make the root color just a little bit darker than the tip. So after I've selected different scales of grey. For the highlight and the glint, I'm gon na have a look at the hair shader in the viewport by turning on the lights and the shadows in the viewport in true blue Peter fashion. I'Ve already set up some lights in my scene, which are just some standard spotlights which will allow me to see the hair shaded. As I work, I'm gon na come back in to the extra interactive panel and I'm gon na hit the 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 can find the density multiplier, which will allow me to put a value like 0.25 and scale down the density of how many hairs are inside my scene. So this is a bit extreme because 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 can make it thicker and puffier like a towel, 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 are like a little ramp, which change 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 the scale, it allows me to change the length, so you can make the hair longer for combing and grooming, or you can make some fuzzy short stubble as well back in the base layer. I can also find a property to change and rebuild the Seavey's, 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 Maya 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 the sculpt layer. You'Ll see that I'll have a sculpt layer to scope where 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 your groom is doing. So there's a few things you need to have in mind when setting up your x-gen projects and 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. So all the x-gen brushes are available. Both on the shelf - and you can also have them out in this floating panel as well, all the 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 are very useful to know about when selecting a brush. It'S important to make sure that you swap from the attribute 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 and brushes work very similar to other Meyer brushes. You will start off by having a brush size and the strength of the effect, and that is mapped to the B and M keys in Maya. So you can press down B and drag to change the size of your brush and you can press M 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 viewport, so I tend to prefer using the slider, so I'm working with brushes, I tend to have the collide with meshes options turned on. This creates a small barrier that you can set a value to which avoids the hair intersecting with the base geometry just by combing, by making various strokes with the brush, you can see that everything stops at Pacific level. That is just a few pixels away from the base geometry. However, if I turn the collide option off, this will affect all the hair down to the root and can help me smooth out some areas. But I still have to be careful because if I push the hair too much, I can push the strands of hair right through the geometry and it's gon na give a very unnatural look and it's gon na be a bit hard to fix it later on. You might have to go in with the grab brush and spend a lot of try and trying to fix this so best use the collide option to start off with I'll quickly undo all those settings and show you the brush off panel. Now, if you're familiar with Photoshop, you should be aware that there are hard brushes and soft brushes, and this is exactly the same thing, except that Maya 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 that 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 gon na see that the effect the brush is much more in the middle of the actual brush stroke. If, however, I switch to this flat profile curve, the brush has the same strength. All the way from in the middle right to the edge, and if I stroke on the surface there are you gon na see that all the hairs are effective and I've got a very hard fall off. So for that initial comb, 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 these settings and go into the root to tip magnitude control - and this is a property - that's unique to x-gen, because x chain 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 comb 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 gon na see that I affect all the parts of the hair as I paint and whether I'm painting the root 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 and the base in the same place. It'S very good for kind of like adding extra waviness 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 viewport 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, XYZ planes as well, and this works exactly the same as any other tool in maya 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 worth while, knowing if I right click, there's a property called filter back faces, and this property is always important to 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, and this is not normally a desired effect, but this tool is very useful when you're, actually working in silhouette, where you can grab multiple strands of hair at different points and groom them into specific shapes. So remember for that initial groom make sure that you've got filter back faces turned on now. We'Ve come to the real fun 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 going to cover every single brush, that's available in x-gen, 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 thinner brush later on. Remember to change the profile of the magnitude curve, and 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, because 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 can help you localize the direction of hairs in certain places, but it still needs a good magnitude shape curve to affect the route and over here I've flattened the hair just a bit way too much. So the result is a bit hard to see. You can add a sculpt layer by going up into the add sculpt layer button and create as many sculpt layers as you need for different parts of the groom. I try to work with either one brush or to work for with a specific effect in mind per layer and keep everything separated, because the same as in Photoshop, multiple layers can create an overall result. Now the best bit of advice that I received while learning x-gen, was to press 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 layer that 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 will 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 brush is one of my favorite brushes because it locks any clumps of hair that you paint 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 3d mask from Photoshop, but you can opt, is 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 can 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 appears within the radius of your brush size. This can be used to lengthen or shorten the hair in a located area and 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 and 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 it 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 are really useful. And we've got to remember that the 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 Maya 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. Stylizing and creating your initial groom by using a combination of brushes be sure to follow reference as you go. Working and 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 customize certain areas until you find the look. That'S okay, as always, work very broad and then go into the detail 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 3ds max or blender, you should be familiar with a modifier stack, which is a list of effects that you can pile on one another to create different. Looks it's important to note that the order of the modifiers can influence? The final look and modifiers can be moved up and down in the stack and turned on and off. So it's a very iterative and very easy to use workflow that allows you to change things with ease, because the 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 can test 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 modifier layer and just delete it now, I'm only going to cover three of the main modifiers that I use to create. The final look for this fur, but you're going to see that, just by adding them experimenting with them, 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 gon na. 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 and texturing, 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 Maya 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 property called frequency by turning the frequency. All the way up. It'S gon na create more irregularity on the surface of the texture and that's going to spread out all of the hairs now modifier layers can be toggled on and off, so you can see the before and after result very easily and I'll have to navigate back into The texture and look for some more properties to play around with, because currently there has a bit too extreme and pointing upwards to make the effect a little bit smoother. I'M going to 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 the 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 push down on the slider you're gon na see that this is gon na reduce The overall effect of the layer and you can feel free to reduce it 60 percent 50 %. Whatever looks good in the viewport, the next modifier I want to talk about is noise and noise is a great way of adding either curls or irregularity to the positioning of the hair. As I add, the noise modifier you're gon na 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 koala fare 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 straightaway and get it right perfectly I'll, tweak these settings loads of times again. If I take things too far with the 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 anime characters, probably clump is your best friend now. The first thing we want to control is how many clumps there are inside the overall fur. If you go to a property called density, you can choose how many overall clumps there are all over the fur by lowering the amount you will see that he starts looking a bit more like a quilt and if we boost this up, there's gon na be many More smaller spikes all over the fur, which is something that I'm looking for, but I'm gon na 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 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 base is 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 that all 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 viewport 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 for straighting 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's adjusted to them. So when you move the slider, you see in effect, but other properties like kernel have no effect when you move the slider at 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. There'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 attribute editor. So, in summary, by adding modifiers, you can change the overall look of the fur by stacking many different modifiers. You can even add multiple stacks of the same modifier, except that every modifier will have slightly different settings. Two clumps three noises and just varying all those settings together can help. You have a very fine control of 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 layer masking or similar to a pass it in Photoshop, where you can turn the overall effect Of the modifier down, you may have noticed that next to most properties inside of x-gen, there's a small checker pattern, which means that that property can be controlled via a texture map. Now, in Mudbox, i've 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'm going to look for its mask property and I'll click on the checker pattern and navigate to where I saved the image from Mudbox 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 a value of one, and we can see the layer at its full length, so all of the grayscale blobs, depending of their intensity from white to black, will create longer hair or shorter hair completely. Depending on the color to remove the texture from the modifier I'll, navigate to the mask, see and right click on the word mask and choose break connection, so let's go ahead and add a clump modifier and see what happens with the textures now. First of all, I need to increase the density because there's too few clumps by default, I'll put it up to a value, that's good for testing and then I'll go looking for the mask property and I'll apply the Mudbox 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 of clumps, so it's important that anything. That'S in the grayscale will have a more overall effect of clumpiness or less effect of the clump layer and again this is the overall effect. All the properties you add it into the clump modifier would be masked by this layer. So let me right. Click on the mask property again and break its connection this time. Let'S look at a noise modifier, so I'm going to add the noise and then again look for the mask property and apply the texture as we've done before, and we can again see that. It very much follows a logical pattern in the areas which are painted white. We can see that the noise is appearing and in the areas which appear 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 of the mesh to create the groom to have different, looks without being dependent on where the polygons are placed or if an overall effect is overriding everything. So I want the chin of the coil to be less furry than the rest of the groom. So back in Mudbox, I'm going to paint a map where most of the character is 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 in Tamiya 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 nother painting as well for the eyes as well, so you'll see a cutout there as well to refine the look of the chin further, I'm gon na add another sculpt layer and start using some different brushes to refine the cut even more. What I'm going to 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 gon na gently trim the moustache area and I'm not really gon na 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 going to use the sculpt layer to bring the intensity of that cut down until the overall effect looks nice I'll finish 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 fur around the eyes and the chin, and 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 curliness to the tips of the hair, and then I also added a little bit of an adjustment to the length of the hair just cuz. I thought that I was losing the original shape of the geometry with so much fur, so just by trimming it down with the scale tool by just 20 %. It made the overall shape just a little bit better. I made a separate groom for the ears and I'm 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 are used for this as well. But the 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, it's 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 3d that sometimes things just don't work and you have to redo them. So the biggest power of these control maps is to add complexity to the groom and it allows you to mix and match different properties in different areas, which makes the fur look much more believable and realistic, as it can mimic things that we can see in natural Reference that we have to finish off rendering the groom is actually quite easy, using the Ahnold renderer and 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 sky dome light with an HDR as part of my standard setup using the standard hair shader, although possibly in the future, I'd like to try out the Arnold hair shader as well, which also exists within Maya. But that's for another time and all the lights which are in my scene are really easy: they're completely available through Arnold, it's just the sky, dome light with some area lights, doing a very simple three-point lighting setup. The only thing that was a little customization that's optional, is to go into each one of the groomed descriptions and look for in their shape node for the Arnold tab and to choose a maximum pixel width of 0.5 and to make sure that the render mode is Set on ribbon just so that the renderer makes the hair a little bit softer. The lights are set up in a very Paul way, where I have the main key light actually coming from the HDR, which is the Sun. In that image - and I made a small fill light with an area light from Arnold and a place that just to fill in the shadows on the right-hand side of the face, then I placed two blue rim lights, which were behind the character and I just made Sure 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 overexposed 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 are complete. I boosted up the render settings following just a anti-aliasing setting of for increasing the specular depth of 3 and then went down into the Ray depth settings and boosted these speculative four and increase the transparency depth to 25. Hopefully this will enhance the look of the shininess 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 render is complete, you can go into the file and choose save image as and you can choose a name for your image and add, whichever extension you like, jpg PNG, EXR and Arnold will just save a file out with with the extension that you need. You can also use the render setup window and that will save the image directly into your project folder. So that's a quick look at the basics of the interactive grooming tools for x-gen. If you found the video interesting, I could do a part two, because my aim would be to be able to have the fur moving interactively alongside with the rig. If that's something that's interesting, then leave me a comment below and I'm gon na leave a link to Josh and Juan Pablos work, so you can find them online in the comment section - and this is probably going to be the last video for the year - I'm gon Na take can break over the Christmas holidays and reconnect and make some more content for you guys, but the last time I said that that was two years later, you got the following video, so hopefully it's not gon na. Take me that long, this time, I'll be available in the comments section and the community page, so make some noise, and I will show up again thanks very much for watching. If you found the video useful remember to Like subscribe and push the bell button to receive notifications of when we're coming back after the holidays have a happy Christmas or whatever your winter celebration is spend some time with your loved ones and have a great new year. As always, keep learning stay strong and I'll catch you in the next video bye-bye