Hair And Fur Questions

[drossxyu]

1)

Is there a way to only affect the tip of your guide curves when using the groom brush? It’s easy to grab the center of the guide curve which ends up bending them in an odd way that’s counter to the direction I’m attempting to brush the curves in. If I make my brush small enough and position my camera strategically I can of course just graze the very top of the curve but it becomes difficult when there’s a lot of guide hairs. 

Additionally, If I use the curve advect tool I notice that all of the guide curves that have been advected have a concave bend to them similar to if I had used the screen brush on the center of the curve instead of the tip as I mentioned above.

2)

Is there a way to pop hairs out that have flipped through the other side of the surface? If I do a simple fur setup on a grid it’s very easy for this to happen with a few strokes of the screen brush.

3)

Are there recommended ways to optimize the viewport when grooming? It seems really sluggish even with a modest amount of guide hairs once you start adding a few guide process nodes. My hair generate node is off of course.

4)

After I place a guide groom node and use the plant guides tool to create a few custom guides the guide groom density no longer has an effect if a raise or lower the value. If I disable the planted guides, it works again. Actually I’m realizing now that even doing a groom with the screen brush seems to lock that initial guide count into place. Is this the intended behavior? 

5)

When using the Hair Clump node it seems like mixing the blend value to 0 doesn’t actually turn the effect off entirely. With default settings and blend set to 0 I still see very obvious clumping. It’s not until I set the fractal clumping iterations to 0 does it act as if I disabled the node entirely. With fractal clumping set to 0 and the blend set back to 1 though, the settings in the general tab (clump size, crossover rate, etc) do absolutely nothing.

6)

Is there a trick to setting the influence radius and decay values in relation to both the guide curve and hair generation density? It seems heavily dependent upon how many guide curves I have of course but I’m finding that’s easy for me to end up with a look that’s too clump-y without actually having a clump node in my setup. If I raise the influence radius higher to move away from the clump-y look it starts to lose any variation I may have added to length, bend and frizz.

If I come up with something that's look pretty promising with a low hair generation density I'm usually surprised at how different feeling it looks once I start to really crank the density values.

Cheers!