In Maya xGen, I can stack multiple hair clumps depending on frequency and area.
For example:
Initially, I can have 5 major clumps
Within those major clumps, I can have 8 medium clumps
Within those 8 medium clamps I can have 20 minor clamps.
So far, what I can see in Blender’s Particle Settings is just one clump curve (under Children setting), which does not give the effect what I want.
Is there a separate setting I am missing out?
P.S. I can’t create a separate hair particle for each clumps (major, medium, minor). They need to be in one hair particle system to have seamless look.
…I think I have had a situation like this one before… where I ended up simply duplicating the object (emitter) and copied the regarding particle system a second time onto the newly duplicated emitter. This way you can create another version of the regarding particle system. That is in Blender 2.79.7 , but I think it might work with the new versions too. It is weird that you can’t edit duplicate a duplicated particle system on the original mesh. This way you can have as many clump variations as you would like to have. And , I think this is currently the only work around.
You can totally copy a hair particle system 1:1 from the original to the exact duplicate object, without getting messed up particles all over the duplicate object. I think it is due to the same vertices arrangement / geometry / layout. Since the duplicate object has the exact same arrangement on vertices… and the same IDs.
I have found an article that illustrates a similar routine. I am not able to access my machine right now, as I am out. But hopefully the following link will help
In a nutshell, you want to copy a specific particle system and change the clump or whatever values on that.
Edit: and another way would be creating a separate blend file and append your emitter, this way the particle system automatically becomes a separate one and you copy it onto your main emitter object this way. This would also allow you to have the same hair particle setting just on a different particle system and change values independently to create more diversity
@Hexenfasching
You are right I can have a replica of the particle system but the problem of this is its a distinct/separate hair object. This can be verified when I move the duplicated object/emitter.
In this case, I can’t stack the settings since its effect is distinct with its particular object/emitter.
yes, indeed… and it will give awkward results when physics are applied. I can see this being an unsuitable option for you.
I was searching various solutions/ways over the internet, but couldn’t really find anything better than what we have gathered in this topic.
Maybe an Add-On, which I haven’t discovered while searching?
I don’t mind using a plug-in but so far the plug-ins I checked (at least on demo videos) builds on top of the build-it hair system. So it can’t stack multiple clump settings too
Currently the Xgen workflow you have mentioned, is not possible in Blender. It is a unfortunate limitation.
But there is a new nodebased hair system in development.
Maybe for your workflow, you could try to model the groom in Xgen, then export the groom as curves to alembic and import them to Blender as alembic. You could then convert the curves to hair particles with Hairnet addon. If you have 100k primitives with 50 control points, you could split up curves in smaller groups with 5k or 10k curves each.
It takes up to 4-5 mins to convert 5k curves with 50 control points and Blender is going to freeze for a while.
It is important, that all of the curves have the same amount of control points, otherwise Hairnet is not going to work.
Thanks for the confirmation. At least, it’s good to know that I’m at a dead-end at the moment for out-of-the-box tools. And the new nodebased hair system in development is certainly interesting.
Thanks for the pointing this out "You could then convert the curves to hair particles with Hairnet addon. " Didn’t know this was possible.
