Wooly

A standalone hair system, which has tools for creating, combing cutting hair.

Firstly the maya scene is exported out to a custom cache scene format, which read by the hair application.

There are controls for density, sizing, segments of the hair follicles.

The one thing which is really cool / hot is the interactive shader previewer. This allows the user to see their shading results on the viewport itself, without having to wait to go through the rendering process.

Also it calculates self shadowing, based on a fast approximation of the Deep Shadow techniques.

Current state of the output can be seen in the images attached, one with no self shadowing and the other one with self shadows calculated.

Current development: physics / dynamic tools using bullet and the hair editing tools.

Later, would be exporting the viewport shaders to the most popular production rendering engines.

nkPasses

hello guys i have just put together a shader tool that writes out RGB / matte / masking passes to a single openexr file for maya 2008.

It segregates the meshes / nurbs into layers of 3. So each layer has a mesh with pure R, pure G and pure B, and their combined alpha.

The cool feature is, it has no software limitations on the number of passes. The number of passes depend on the number of objects in the scene. The only limitation is the amount of memory available on the system hardware.

A typical HD 720p scene could render out ~200 passes / layers into an exr. More testing required to confirm benchmarks and in the meantime, I will find a place to upload the files for people to use.

if you are interested in the early bird edition, please drop me your email, will mail it to you.