So, the furry fellow has been to a hairstylist with rather crazy attitude...

Anyways, what I'm showing in this image: each hair can be textured
individually, or the entire bunch of hairs can share the same texture. The
hair-meshes are properly uv-mapped so that gradients along the length of the
hair are possible. It is actually used quite subtly in this image: the hairs
are dark at the base.

The hairs "styling" was achieved by modifying the normal-vector of the
sample, this can be done with a simple macro that gets a few parameters to
tune this effect. The macro also takes care of picking a length. Similiar to
the method re-using hairs I don't generate *all* lengths required, but only
a set amount of lengths and clip to the closest one. The results are
satisfying,
and if more detail is needed, you can always crank up the steps! :-)

The textures were generated using a macro that gets called when placing the
hair. Again, it gets various parameters and then generates a texture from
that. Both macros, the styling and the texturing one, can be declared by the
User to give him/her complete control over style and color.

The underlying fellow mesh is a hand-posed subdivision-surface-mesh from
Silo. It doesn't allow bones yet and has no animation support, so don't
expect this guy to appear in an animation anytime soon... ;-)

Things that need to be done before release of the macros: File-Output to
save parsing time. I'm thinking about two types:
1. All possible hairs are generated and saved to disk.
2. The hairs are generated only when they are needed, the final array thus
may have "holes", but all hairs required for this image are done.

Anyways, that's just a recap of the current situation. Note that the
hair-strand itself is limited to straight bends, no curles or such, but the
hair-creation-macro can be exchanged quite easily so that other hair-macros
can be used.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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