GUIDE FIELDS
Shave works from a 3 dimensional flow field bounded by something called 'hair guides' (left). When guides are emitted from a surface ( nurb or poly), a whole field of them are created. The number of guides relate directly to the number of CV's in the emitting surface. They define the general shape of the hair.

The actual hair (right), which can be previewed at lower counts in the viewer, is an even distribution across the emission surface, and has nothing to do with how many guides you have. Initially the hair is grown as a straight interpolation of the guides, and then displaced by parameters such as 'kink' and 'frizz'.

SMOOTH DENSITY
Our density equalizer balances hair population so that regardless of the density of the underlying surface or number of guides, you still get a uniform distribution of hair as a base line. If you want to fiddle with that balance you can assign maps and shaders to our density channel. Unlike other solutions, we do a world-space barycentric lookup, which is just a fancy way of saying it doesn't require special UV's and will work on polygons, nurbs , or any other type of surface emitter.

SPLINE MODE
An other types of guides are ' spline guides'. For each Maya spline you select, Shave creates a duplicate guide. Hair is then evenly interpolated between the guides (above) , interpolation can be turned off as well.

THE BRUSH TOOL & RECOMB
Combing hair is quick and easy. With the brush tool and ‘ recomb ', brushing along complicated contours is as easy as petting a dog (the above example was just a few interactive strokes of the tool).

STYLING INTERFACE
Creating so many guides assures good local control on hair shape, and steady dynamics. But controlling and combing so many guides comes with it's challenges too, which is why we've integrated a custom styling interface right into the Maya viewport.

Each little guide is actually a kinematic chain, it can either be modeled into place, it can be just sha ken around, or it can be dragged en-masse with a soft hairbrush tool.