"gregjohn" <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message 
news:web.49ac9c52fea29af834d207310@news.povray.org...
> Hi.  I was looking at the makehumanhair.inc.  Some of the text suggests 
> that
> this include itself will make hair, but I thought I saw hair development 
> being
> on the roadmap for mh itself.
>
> Can you help me understand?
>

Yes. Correct on both counts.

Some sort of hair is planned for MakeHuman, though I haven't yet seen 
anything indicating which approach will be taken for implementing that.

The POV-Ray export incorporates a groupings file that enables you to 
separately identify various parts of the anatomy by name and to generate 
separate meshes. This is a generic approach that should enable clothing and 
other props generated in POV-Ray to be fitted to the MH figure. One example 
that I've been playing with to explore this possibility is the hairline. At 
the bottom of the makehuman_groupings.inc file I've created a distinct group 
of mesh elements that cover the parts of the top back and sides of the head 
that hair normally grows out of. POV-Ray users can do the same in a scene 
file to add their own groupings.

The makehuman_hair.inc file contains a macro to generate a mesh from this 
group of elements and cuts bits away with CSG to leave a clean hairline 
shaped object from which hairs can be grown.  I'll probably leave this in 
the MakeHuman export as it serves as an example of how to manipulate 
separate components of the generated model, including using the 'skeleton' 
to determine the location and orientation of body parts.

I have an old hair growth macro that tracks individual hairs, following the 
contours of an anatomy and responding to gravity. If I can get it to work 
properly with the generated mesh objects then my plan is to load it onto the 
Object Collection so that it can be used in conjunction with any generated 
MakeHuman models. This may be rendered a little redundant if the MH hair 
solution is really good, but might still give POV-Ray users some interesting 
options. For example it should work with any body part (hands, face etc.), 
whereas I suspect that the MakeHuman hair generator is likely (at least in 
the early releases) to only work with the head.

Regards,
Chris B.

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