Joe Alter has previewed Shave and a Haircut 10: a major update to the veteran Maya hair and fur plugin that ports the entire application to the GPU, and adds powerful new real-time grooming and sculpting functionality.
The release, which is due to ship in November, was on display at Siggraph 2016 earlier this week.
JoeAlter Shave And A Haircut For Maya 2016 2016.5 2017 2018 v9.6v14 JoeAlter Shave And A Haircut For Maya 2016 / 2016.5 / 2017 / 2018 v9.6v14 (Win/Mac/Lnx)| 98 MB (Total) Joe Alter Shave and a Haircut is a plugin for Maya, that creates extra realistic hair and fur surfaces.
A hair and fur solution with a long pedigree
First released over a decade ago, Shave and a Haircut was one of the first dedicated commercial hair and fur simulation systems for DCC software.
Although best known as a Maya plugin, the underlying tech was also integrated into 3ds Max and Softimage.
Although the software dropped out of the news for a few years at the start of the decade while Alter worked on facial sculpting and rigging tool LipService, it remains in use at studios including DreamWorks and Technicolor.
A sizeable update, Shave and a Haircut 9.0, was released late last year, but Alter tells us that development work on version 10 was actually begun three years ago.
New in version 10: full GPU support
The major change in Shave and a Haircut 10 is extended GPU support: the entire application has been ported to the GPU, improving real-time performance for hair generation, grooming and display.
The implementation is OpenCL-based, so it should be compatible with any modern graphics card.
New brush tool paints on over 100 channels in real time
In addition, a new brush tool makes it possible to paint on over 100 channels – 60 or so of them entirely new; and including dynamics and displacement – and see the hair react dynamically.
Paint operations occur on a per-hair basis and respect the UVs of the mesh on which the hair is generated.
Sculpting improvements and support for geometry hierarchies
There are also “over a dozen sculpt improvements” including three new sculpt tools, with the results also calculated in real time.
The demo build we saw at Siggraph didn’t support real-time hair-to-hair collisions, but Alter tells us that this will be implemented before version 10 is released.
In addition, new “hierarchical generation types” make it possible to control different levels of a geometry hierarchy separately – for example, the quill and barbs of a feather, or the trunk and branches of a tree.
Other new features include support for programmable forces
Version 10 also implements ‘blowers’ – new programmable force types that can be applied to a hair system.
Other features include real-time updates on moving rigs and, on the display front, real-time A-buffer deep opacity and sampling.
Pricing and availability
Shave and a Haircut 10 for Maya is due to ship in November. The release is expected to include a proof-of-concept integration plugin for Unity, with other such integrations expected to follow.
Shave And A Haircut Train
Pricing hasn’t been finalised yet, but Alter tells us that he expects the cost to be roughly double that of version 9, which is available on a rental-only basis, starting at $50/month for a node-locked licence.
Shave And A Haircut Software
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