Creating a Centurion Helmet

Creating a Centurion Helmet

Recombing the Helmet Crest of Hair

 

Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials > Hair and Cloth Tutorials > Hair > Creating a Centurion Helmet > 

Adding Hair to the Helmet

Add the Hair And Fur modifier to the helmet:

1. Open helmet_hair_start.max from your \tutorials\hair folder. This scene contains two mesh objects named Head and Helmet.
2. Select the Helmet object, and then go to the Modify panel and apply the Hair And Fur modifier. Hair And Fur is a world-space modifier (WSM).

   

   Hair emanates from the entire helmet.

3. The hair should grow only on selected portions of the helmet, so on the Selection rollout, click Polygon to go to the Polygon sub-object level.
4. Turn on Ignore Backfacing.
5. Select the polygons in the groove at the top of the helmet.

   This is easiest to do in the Top viewport: use Arc Rotate to make sure you've selected all these polygons. When the selection is complete, press Shift+Z to restore the original Top view. (You might have to press Shift+Z more than once.)

   

   Selecting the crest polygons

   TipYou can use Ctrl+click (or drag) to add or remove polygons from the selection, and Alt+click (or drag) to remove them.
6. On the Selection rollout, click Update Selection.

   The hairs now emanate only from the selected polygons.

   

   Hairs growing from the crest only.

Modify the Hair general parameters:

1. Scroll down to the General Parameters rollout.

   

2. Change the hair count to 10000.
3. Reduce Hair Segments to 4. This value is the number of segments created along the length of each hair. Shorter hair needs fewer segments; longer hair needs more segments. Lowering the number of segments also reduces the amount of time it takes to render the scene.
4. Change the Rand(om) Scale value to 0.0.

   For this example, the helmet hair is all the same length, without any random scaling.

5. Set the Root Thick and Tip Thick values both to 2.0 so that the hairs are the same thickness along their entire length.

   Next you'll change the frizz and material properties of the hair.

Modify the Frizz and Material Properties of the helmet crest:

1. Open the Frizz Parameters rollout.

   

2. Set the Frizz Root and Frizz Tip values to 10.0.
3. Open the Material Parameters rollout.

   

4. Select a bright, saturated red for the Tip Color and black for the Root color.
5. Reduce both Hue Variation and Value Variation to 5.0.

   Because this is dyed hair, its color and texture are more uniform than natural hair. We want to add a bit of variety, but not much.

6. Leave the Mutant % value at 0.0.

   Mutant hairs are randomly selected and receive the color assigned. Mutant hairs are present in natural hair; as we age, we have more and more mutant gray or white hairs. However, the foot solder's helmet plume will not age (they used dyed horsehair), so you'll leave the mutant hairs out for now.

Render your scene to view the hair:

The Hair And Fur modifier requires at least one spotlight in the scene to render shadows.

1. From the right-click quad menu, choose Unhide All to unhide the lights in the scene.

   Two omni lights for general lighting and one spotlight for the Hair And Fur modifier appear. The spotlight is set to render shadows.

   A Hair And Fur render effect is necessary to render hair, but this is added automatically when you first apply the Hair And Fur modifier to an object in the scene. Also, by default the render effect is set to automatically use all spotlights in the scene to illuminate the hair, so no don't need to take further action to adjust the lighting.

   You can now render your scene.

2. With the Perspective viewport active, render your scene (press F9).
   NoteYou can render hair only in a Perspective or Camera viewport.

   Your centurion helmet should look something like this:

   

   Rendered image of the helmet