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.
[pullquote]”shave and a haircut” running in maya 2014 in vp 2.0 on a pretty ordinary i7 with an NVidia K5000[/pullquote]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.
