Manual Modules Hair Objects and Tags Render
Render Basic TagTag Properties
This setting lets you turn the Render Tag on or off.
See the Trail option below.
Point
This mode is designed for use with polygon objects and lets an individual hair be grown on a geometry point.
Surface
This mode is designed for use with polygon objects and lets hair grow randomly on the object’s polygons.
Line
This mode is designed for use with splines and renders each spline or spline segment as a single hair.
Interpolated
This mode is designed for use with splines. If a spline has different segments, this mode will interpolate hair between these segments. The number of hairs generated should be kept reasonably low.
Position
This mode is designed for use with particles. It renders a very small hair point for each particle. The size of this hair point can be defined by applying a Hair material and assigning the Thickness channel’s Root and Tip settings equal values.
Velocity
This option will render a tangential velocity vector as a hair, at the position of each particle. The hair length can be varied using Scale.
Trail analyses a particle stream’s flight path and creates hair based on the flight paths of these particles.
Trail offers a number of special settings:
Auto Time: By deactivating Auto Time the Start and Stop settings are made available, with which you can determine the exact time span within which a particle stream’s flight path should be analyzed and rendered as hair.
If this option is active, the default settings will apply (see Preferences).
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| Limit active. |
If Limit is deactivated, the entire flight path of the particle stream will be rendered as hair. If Limit is active, the particle stream’s flight path can be calculated backwards to the current time using Trail. If Limit is set to 10, for example, the particle stream’s flight path over the course of the previous 10 frames will be rendered as hair.
What should happen with the hair when the particle stream’s lifespan has ended? This is exactly what you define using the On Death setting:
Remain: The trail and hair remain after the particles die.
Remove: The hair dies when the particles die.
Run Out: The (still moving) hair will be cut at the location of the particle’s death.
If you drag a Hair material directly onto an object it will be completely covered more or less only with fill hair. Fill hair brings with it several disadvantages, such as not being visible behind transparent objects or not being able to be mirrored. With Fill Hair you can tell transparent objects or objects that reflect to render these hairs (expect increased memory demands and longer render times).
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| Fill hair is not visible through transparent objects or in objects that mirror. Non-fill (real) hair is visible, though. |
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| Below, Fill Hair is not active. |
The tags shown in the top half of the above image cause the hair to have a strange block-effect.
The first tag in both rows of tags has a Percent value of 50% in the Use menu, which means that the first tag randomly grabs half the number of real hairs and colors them green. The remaining real hair will be colored blonde (default color).
If you drag the Hair material onto an object, a (Hair) Render Tag will be created internally (with Fill Hair active). Real (but not much) hair is only present on the object points, the rest is fill hair which is an interpolation of the few real hairs and their color, resulting in the strange block-effect. The reason for this: The 50% affects only 400 real hairs (the plane has 20x20 segments). In the bottom half of the above image, the 50% affects all 100000 hairs.
Defines the hair length.
Defines the hair length in Velocity mode when using particles.
Enter the amount of hair for polygon-based hair or hair interpolated between spline segments.
Polygon objects will produce a homogenous distribution of hair only if all polygons are of the same size, since large polygons are given just as much hair as small polys.
Use this option to change the number of hair segments. By default, the hair generated is straight as an arrow, and the number of segments it has is basically irrelevant. If, though, you apply a Hair material to an object to which the Render Tag is assigned, the resulting shape can require a higher number of segments in order to achieve the desired result.
Just as with polygon objects, you can drag a Polygon Selection Tag into this field to limit the hair growth on that selection.