Create Stray Hairs from One Xgen Description in Maya

Autodesk’s Daryl Obert has a look at modifying an Xgen hair set in Maya that will create some stray hairs that escape form the main set of styled hair. This can give any character a more natural look.

How to use expressions to work with stay hairs in XGen

Creating escaping hairs is fairly simple by using two descriptions – one to form the styled forms of the hair, and the other that will act as a set that is only there fro the escaping or stray hairs. But this is not how Daryl demonstrates in this tutorial.

stray Xgen Hair

You can create the stray hairs by using simple expressions, all from the same Xgen description that can create the stray hairs – having a few hairs set as being “stray” and then having those hairs get their own unique Xgen attributes.

Expressions for Strays

The expressions that will handle the stry hairs in Xgen are two short ones

Frequency: stray() ? 1 : 10
Magnitude: stray() ? 1.5 : .1

 

Getting Started Creating Hair with Maya Xgen

If you are looking to get started using Xgen to create hair for characters in Maya, there was a previous post Using Maya’s XGen to Create and Style Hair that walks through the basics.