Chapter 19: Adding and Styling Hair, Fur, and Cloth

Overview

I want to start this chapter with a bold statement, "Bald Is Beautiful." I make this statement because I have a close brother who, upon discovering his hair had started thinning, decided that bald was the way to go. But, after seeing far too many 3D models that were bald because of the unavailability of a decent hair plug-in in Max, I can also declare that "Bald Is Boring."

Now that Max has hair and fur, I expect the see the level of realism for a number of Max artists, including myself, take a quantum leap forward.

Creating cloth isn't that difficult. In fact, with a plane primitive, you can easily create a perfectly straight blanket, towel, or flag. However, animating cloth that drapes realistically over a character is very difficult and best left to dynamic engines like reactor.

Although you can still animate cloth collections using reactor, Max also has a separate stand-alone cloth simulation system aptly named Cloth that you can use to create deformable cloth and to animate it as well.

CROSS-REF 

The hair and cloth systems in Max are dynamic, meaning that they are affected by forces in the scene such as wind and gravity. The dynamic nature of hair and doth is covered in Chapter 38, "Animating Hair and Cloth."