Hair and Fur plugins for Maya and Octane?

[itsallgoode9]

I need to render some hair for a a project and wondering if anybody can let me know what the plugin of choice is for Maya. Or do people just use Maya's hair and fur? Are there any options other there which I don't have to convert to geo before rendering?

Sorry for the "do a f*ckin' search" questions but everything I was finding regarding hair and fur were dealing with other programs

[calus]

The maya plugin render pfx nodes in Maya, so you can render maya hair, paint effect or anything producing pfx stroke excepted the toon stroke for some reason.
As far as I know, Maya Fur and external plugin are not supported.

[itsallgoode9]

I guess I misspoke originally, forgetting that hair and fur are different beasts. Really i'm looking for a fur solution for Octane but it sounds like i'm out of luck :-\

Anyways, the shaving brush below is what I need to make. currently, this we are just using photography comped in to the render but that's kind of a hack and makes any camera animations impossible.. Any suggestions, if fur isn't an option in octane? Is it possible to do with maya hair instead of fur (I'm just not versed in hair one bit)?

[calus]

Sure, you can make nice Fur with maya hair and a lot of dense follicles.
Or you can use Xgen to make some fur, convert Xgen guide to curves then to hair,
or you can paint some fur directly with a paint effect brush.
You can even convert the old maya fur to hair with the Soup plugin.

The best way to go depends on what exactly you want to achieve... I'm not sure what you describe here : "Anyways, this shaving brush is what I need to make. currently, this we are just using photography comped in to the render but it leaves us limited to angles we can use and makes animation impossible. "

[itsallgoode9]

Sorry, I fixed the reference image link. That should make the last part of my post make a little more sense

Thanks for the suggestions. I found some videos on Xgen where they're using it more for fur type of stuff rather than human hair and that looks like it has potential.

[calus]

Yes Xgen has some potentiel but don't forget you have to convert it to curve, then convert the curve to hair, to render them with octane.
http://lesterbanks.com/2014/08/converti ... rves-maya/

As I see now what you want to achieve, maya hair will be a simpler better solution I think.

[itsallgoode9]

yeah, the conversion process with Xgen was something I was a bit worried about eating up a ton of time and causing a pretty big annoyance over time.

I'll give both hair and xgen a look and see which one I get along better with. Thanks for the suggestions.