Jason Neufeld

I was working on a groom that had 7 or 8 Guide Groom nodes in a Hair Generate node which was generating just over 100,000 hair strands. That was probably my first mistake, since that contains all the dense hairs, but I was hoping to be able to tweak as I went along.

I noticed as I went along that saving my scene started taking longer and longer, and finally looked at the .hip file itself, which was >500MB(!). This scene so far is just a single model with <20k polys, so the hair seemed to be the prime suspect. Sure enough, each hair node was taking 50+MB. I wrote a python script to merge them all into one groom node by merging all the ‘strokes’ and ‘bakedstrokes’ parms and setting it on a single new object. This of course had some visual glitches due to the nodes in between the other groom nodes not occuring in the expected order.

Ultimately I scrapped everything but a couple procedural nodes in the hair generate (like clump/frizz), and am now back to trying to make everything translate over from the guide node.

So I'm not sure if this is a request for how to simplify/speed up my workflow or a feature request for a future way to compress/consolidate guide groom nodes.

EDIT: Wanted to also point out that removing the all the groom nodes definitely sped up my saving back to nearly instantaneous (instead of 10-15 seconds) and drastically reduced file size.

Really enjoying H16 so far. I've been trying lots of different software packages' hair solutions and I think the new grooming tools may be the control I need for the character I'm working on. I am finding in some cases I'd really like deep customization with guides I pull in from other geometry rather than guides made purely in the Guide/Hair objects. My issue is that I haven't been able to find the actual attributes I can modify to effect hair generation. Some of them are obvious, the ones explicitly specified and overrideable in individual groom process nodes, but the ones that actually affect the hair generate node and mantra rendering have thus far mostly eluded me. So far I've been able to find the following scattered through the docs:

width - Not sure what this one controls other than display of guide width, which when I import from external geometry is huge until I set this.
thickness - Rendering thickness I think?
clumpid - seems to group clumps together, but I'm not sure if that's just a legacy H15 thing as I wasn't able to get it to work, but I didn't spend too much time on it.

So, is there an official list of attributes for this, and, in general, is there a good way to find lists of these for other operators that I just haven't stumbled across yet? Thanks!