Maya Monday: Create Hair and Fur with Maya, XGen, and More… Plus Freebies

This is a roundup of resources about creating hair and fur with Maya. We’re focusing on XGen but there are resources here for working with V-Ray Next for Maya and Corona Renderer in Maya. Plus, where to download the Maya hair plugin Shave and a Haircut for free.

Featured image credit: Peter Beukema@peterbeukema

Maya XGen to Create Hair

According to Autodesk, “XGen is an instancing tool most commonly used for creating hair or populating a scene with instanced geometry.”

With XGen, which is GPU accelerated, users can

• easily generate hair
• groom hair with interactive brushes
• animate hair manually

Below are some resources at the Maya Autodesk Help:

• XGen Learning Paths
• XGen interactive grooming modifiers
• Interactive grooming Displacement modifier attributes

Finding your Feet with XGen – XGen for beginners

Danny Mac 3D shows you some basics for XGen.

XGen Maya Hair Tutorial – Louise by Eisko

You can download the virtual Louse model for free from Eisko. It is compatible with Maya, Unreal and Unity.

Maya Xgen Hair Cards for Game Character Tutorial

Victory3D talks about Hair Cards.

Create Hair with V-Ray and Corona Renderer in Maya

Amazing Manes, Bedazzling Beards And Photorealistic Fur With V-Ray Next For Maya.
CG artist Andrew “Charly Tutors” Krivulya “shares his tricks for luscious CG locks — and reveals how Chaos Cloud has boosted his workflow.” The examples are useful, as well.

He was also interviewed about his work using Corona Renderer, and it’s hair shader, again, with lots of nice examples.

Get Shave and a Haircut 9.6 for Free

Epic Games acquired Shave and a Haircut from Joe Alter not too long ago.

Compatibility:

• Maya 2017 and 2018
• Windows 8.1+, Linux, macOS 10.10.5 and 10.11

Get Shave and a Haircut 9.6

More Maya Articles on Creating Hair and XGen

Maya XGen and Interactive Grooming Tutorial Roundup

Maya 2017 Update 3 brought the interactive grooming tools and they’re really powerful! With XGen, you can create natural-looking hair and animal fur. Here are some overviews and examples of what XGen Interactive grooming can do.

Go to the tutorial

Autodesk Maya

Make it with Maya Computer Animation Software

Maya® 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software. It provides an integrated, powerful toolset. Use it for animation, environments, motion graphics, virtual reality, and character creation.

Learn More

Autodesk Media and Entertainment Collection

End-to-end creative tools for entertainment creation

The Media & Entertainment Collection lets animators, modelers, and visual effects artists access the tools they need. With it, they create compelling effects, believable 3D characters, and massive digital worlds with one-click workflows.

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Autodesk Arnold Render

Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer, meeting the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. In fact, Sony Pictures Imageworks co-developed Arnold and it’s now their main renderer. Furthermore, over 300 studios worldwide use Arnold including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures.

Learn More