[MS]

I am just playing around with new hair system in Cinema. I have found in the manual:

Firstly, the most important factor to keep in mind is that it is only possible to transfer the hair guides from C4D Hair into the MXS file as Maxwell Hair. In cases where this does not suffice, it is advised that you use the Hair object's Generate tab to output geometry (be sure to check the 'Single Object' option). The plugin detects whether this (i.e. generating 'Single Object' hair geometry) is the case; there is no need to add any special tags to control it.

Questions:

1] Why only hair guides can be transferred?
2] When I use output geometry I lose all advantages of new hair system, the geometry is generated, in Maxwell Studio the generated object is regular mesh object not the hair object. Am I right? Or did I miss something? Increasing number of hair make Cinema to freeze...
3] If I try only to use hair guides, the Cinema freeze as well, when I increase guides count to high...
4] Can anyone provide functional Cinema scene sample with working setup, please?
5] It would be nice to use regular spline to generate Maxwell hair instead of Cinema Hair system object...


As I have only demo of Studio version it is very frustrating to setup new hair object and material every time Cinema crashed...

[JDHill]

Hi MS, going question-by-question:

1. Because guides are the data which is available; we hope to do runtime interpolation of extra hairs in the future.
2. Yes, if you generate geometry, the plugin will export that geometry, rather than using the hair primitive.
3. That may be the case, depending on your machine and how many guides you use. It is not really a plugin problem, right?
4. Here is a simple example scene:
   hair.zip
5. I will check, this should be possible to do somehow, and would be pretty cool.

[MS]

Hello JDHill, thank you for your quick and precise answers.

Ad1) You mean there are no data in Cinema SDK representing each hair, right?
Ad2) Understood.
Ad3) Understood. I tried to simulate large plain of grass... If I set number of guides to 1 000 000 or so, Cinema stopped responding. You are right, this is not a plugin issue.
Ad4) Thank you for the scene, it works properly.
Ad5) If it is possible it will be great! I use a custom plugin to generate fur/grass/hair which produce splines as an output.

I have one more item I have found during testing. (I cannot save the scene as I am in demo, but the scene is simple. )
Two Plane objects, the smaller one is moved out of (0,0,0) origin and is used in Hair object as "Link" in Guides tab of Hair object.

In Cinema view the guides are on smaller plane object as I expected.




When I export the scene to Maxwell Hair object is rendered in 0,0,0 location.



I see in your sample scene, that you use Hair object as a child of Plane. It will solve my problem. But it would be nice to have views in Cinema and output synchronized.

Thank you again for you great work you do for Cinema!

[JDHill]

1) Yes, afaik that's the case -- we have to write algorithms for generating render-time fill hairs ourselves. On the issue you illustrate above, thanks, and sorry, this was actually pointed out to me during testing, but I simply forgot to address it. Basically, I am transforming the hair according to the transformation of the hair object, when Cinema apparently ignores that.

[MS]

Thank you. Now I understand and I keep playing with a new toy

[tennet]

Hi JDHill, I tried your example scene and it renders like this. No hair is rendered?



// frederik

[JDHill]

Could you let me know what you are using?

1. version & architecture of Cinema
2. architecture of Maxwell
3. operating system

[tennet]

1) version & architecture of Cinema

We are using Cinema R13 Studio on Mac OS X

2) architecture of Maxwell

What does architecture of Maxwell mean? :/ We are using Maxwell 2.6.0, downloaded today (3 nov).

3) operating system

Mac OS X 10.6.8

[JDHill]

Sorry, architecture means 32- or 64-bit. You can use right-click > Get Info in Finder to confirm whether you are running the applications in 32- or 64-bit.

[tennet]

Ah, OK. We are running both Cinema and Maxwell in 64-bit mode.

// Frederik

[MS]

Hi Frederik,

have you updated plugin to latest version too?

[JDHill]

It is working fine for me here, so let me download a fresh copy of Maxwell from the portal and double-check that something did not change. That could take awhile with my internet connection -- in the meantime here are a couple more items to check:

1. check for any messages being printed by the plugin in Cinema's Console window. You can also confirm which version of the plugin is running here.
2. confirm that when you start Maxwell or Studio from the plugin, it is truly the 2.6.0 version which runs. In other words, do the standard things: make sure there is not more than one version of Maxwell on the machine, empty the trash, reboot the machine, confirm that MXS files are set to open in Maxwell.app or Studio.app in Finder.

[tennet]

D'oh! Sorry guys, I didn't install the newest plugin... It's working fine now. It says "Cinema Ver12" on the download page, so I didn't think the plugin was changed... my bad!

/ frederik

[JDHill]

No worries, just let me know if you run into any other issues -- this build has a ton of changes from the previous one, some more subtle than others (multi-substep motion blur support, for instance).