Hair and Fur in 3D Studio Max 2008

If you have tried to make a furry or hairy character in an animation, you know the problems involved and you realise why you generally only see the larger studios use it in their films.

The main problem with the various hair and fur plug-ins for Max is that they all work fine with doing stills and smaller animations, but when it comes to making more complex setups problems usually arise. It might be issues with styling, dynamics going out of control or it simply that they are not fully compatible with the rendering engine of your choice. Believe me, there are times when you really wish you had your own personal programmer beside you. After testing several plugins over the past few months, including the now built-in Hair & Fur in Max, it seems there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.

Hairtrix is if fact not one, but two plug-ins in one package. It contains the latest HairFX (previously known as ShagHair) and the latest Ornatrix. Both of these plugins also work with each others tools with some minor constraints. Tools to customize the hairs and fur include the standard frizz, curliness and clumping controls, but if needed you can go down to draw splines to use as guides. Other packages do this as well, but not as seamlessly as Ornatrix. Rendering is fairly fast and quality is good even on lower settings. Most importantly for us is that Hairtrix seem to solve two of the main problems; a hair plug-in that was both fast and fully compatible with V-Ray. So far, it seems like Hairtrix is the way to go when it comes to hair and fur in 3D Studio Max 2008.