Hair

MayaMan provides support for Maya 6.0 Hair module. It does this by reading the 'Mesh Output' of the pfxHair node and converting the polygons back into curves.

Configuring the pfxHair node for MayaMan

To get the proper color on the hair go into the 'Mesh Output' section of the pfxHair node and set the 'Color Per Vertex' control to 'Color'. If the setting is 'None' then the hair will be white unless you attach a custom shader through a MayaManAttributes node. Don't use 'Illuminated' because MayaMan will direct the renderer to do the lighting.

Configuring the hairSystem node for MayaMan

As MayaMan always output cubic curves you don't need to crank up the 'Sub Segments' control unless braiding requires it.

Motion Blur

MayaMan will blur the hair when vertex blur is enabled. Backward motion blur is preferred as there seems to be an update issue with the hair system if forward/centered mode is used.

Limitations

As MayaMan gets the curve info by interrogating a mesh the number of hairs that can be rendered is limited... the limit is large but maya gets really slow with large hair counts. We are hoping to get some information from A|W that will allow us to access the curve data directly.

The 'MultiStreak' capability is not implemented.