'TWISTER!' turns Shave into a massive particle system. 'Twister!' is a displacement plugin that utilizes Shave's interface to define particle paths instead of hairs, and utilizes Shave's render plugin to draw particles. Like Shave, only one particle is in memory at a time, so no memory penalty for millions of particles. Also, 'Twister!' uses shave's dynamics to move it. There are so many uses for this plugin, that this example really just scratches the surface. It is a free plugin that comes with "Shave and a Haircut"

Here's how it works.

TWISTER! uses shave's guide hairs to define paths for particles to follow, and you define a speed in the displacement plugin.

Here's a quick run-through of how the above image was created.
1. In model, make a tube and assign the bottom row of polys as 'hair'. Save it out as 't4.lwo'
2. twist/taper it and save it out as 'twisted.lwo'
3. open the shave.exe and get->model->t4.lwo . Shave will grow some hair at the bottom
4. scale up the hair and align it with the tube
5. now select 'whole strand' and 'surface lock' the verts.
6. adjust kinkiness, this will give you a preview of the shape of the paths that the particles will follow. When satisfied, save out 't4.hair'
7. in layout load twisted, assign some bones and do some animation. Because you surfacelocked your guidehairs to the t4 geometry, and we've replaced that with geometry of the same point count/order with twisted.lwo, the hairs will now be bent to follow the twisted.lwo geometry.
8. add the HAIRrender pix filter
9. add the 'TWISTER!' displacement plug and put 't4.hair' in the 'hairfile' field.
11. dissolve out the t4 geometry.
18. render
For each hair shave would normally generate with 'cnt', twister generates 50-500 particles depending on your sampling. A 'CNT' value of 1000, for instance, will generate 450,000 shaded particles with MEDIUM NO ADAPTIVE. The above image took 7 minutes (cnt set to 5500, so 2.47 million particles) with MEDIUM NO ADAPTIVE, MOTION BLUR ON, and two light sources.
Click here to download files for this example




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