Joe Alter’s Shave and a Haircut is due for a new release soon. Shave and a Haircut 10 has moved all of the hair generators that it uses over to the GPU. This means that the preview that you will see in the viewport isn’t just a shaded preview, but it is the actual hair. Hair will be able to cast and receive shadows when using Maya’s Viewport 2, and is constantly generated for the viewport.
“shave and a haircut” running in maya 2014 in vp 2.0 on a pretty ordinary i7 with an NVidia K5000
This will allow you to have realtime hair interactions when adjusting the grooming, color, length and other attributes. This is also good news for exporting Shave and a Haircut 10’s output to a realtime game engine as one export, which has been a goal of the development team.
The video shows off an example that uses Shave and a Haircut 10 running in Maya 2014 with Viewport 2 on a system that uses a modest i7 with an Nvidia K5000.
Shave and a Haircut 10 will move to a subscription type of model that will be based on a year’s lease. This will allow it to be a bit cheaper, and releases upgrades from Maya version schedules. The team notes that it will lead to getting versions that work with the latest Maya versions, faster.
