Art Director and Generalist Dzung Phung Dinh of ThunderCloud Studios has recently dropped an update to his GMH script for creating and styling hair for characters. GMH, or “Geo to Maya Hair” was a script created back in 2010 that was designed to help artists convert and edit polygon hair for characters into Maya Hair systems.
GMH2 is a more advanced version of GMH script, specialized in hair modeling & stylizing
This allowed you to produce complex and realistic looking hair in a shorter amount of time than simply starting out creating and styling Maya Hair alone. In fact the streamlined workflow from GMH’s interface boasted that you could cut your hair development time by at least two thirds. Thats significant.
GMH’s interface allowed you to easily manage and organize hair strokes and everything that was associated with the Maya Hair system, including follicles and dynamics.
A new Version in GMH2
GMH2 which was recently released builds upon the work set out with the original GMH script. The tools are focused on allowing artists to easily model hair styles using familiar and traditional polygon modeling tools. Then GMH2 provides a method for transforming the polygon hair to a Maya hair system. This can all be done with two simple steps.
The conversion process has been cleaned up in GMH2, you can now generate Maya Hair from polygon meshes with a single click, where with the original GMH script, the process involved a few more steps.
Once the hair has been created from the original polygon meshes, GMH2 will still allow you to work in editing the poly. The applied hair will update as you go, dynamically changing to match what you are modeling with the polygon guides.
GMH2 allows you to now add more than one hair system to polygon meshes. This can achieve more realistic hair by customizing the hair with two or three hair systems to get a particular look.
GMH2 has had some updates to the interface, including the preset manager which will let you edit and manage multiple hairstyles easily.
As GMH2 uses Maya native nodes, you are able to enjoy file parody with any version of Maya regardless if the script is present or not. This also allows GMH2 to be compatible with virtually any renderer that handles Maya hair – Mental Ray, V-Ray, and Maya Soft.
Availability
the GMH2 script is written in MEL so it will runs on a PC, Linux or Mac, is compatible with (32 & 64 bit version): Maya 2013 , Maya 2014. GMH2 is a tiny bit more pricey than its predecessor, and will set you back a mere $39.00.
To learn more about GMH2 or to purchase, chaco the page here ThunderCloud Studios GMH2 Script for Maya Hair
