GS CurveTools v1.1 Major Update Tutorial (2/3) - Maya Plug-in, Realtime Hair Cards, Game Hair

here we go hello everyone so we had a new major update for the plugin it's her cars plugin for Maya if you don't know so let me just go straight to the point here so let's go over new features right so we had some issues that I fixed in this update and I actually added a bunch of new stuff here so first of all what's bugs who had eliminated is we had this weird like a stack trace error when we started at the Maya next time after we actually docked the window and close Maya and who starts it again we had some weird issues with that that's all fixed nothing to worry about and also a lot of app optimization in this version so let's go over the new features I have a small list that we need to discuss so first of all installing an updating right so the first thing that you need to do is update if you already have this plug-in that's that's very easy you just delete the old folder the GS underscore cur of tools tools folder and you just place the new one that I have provided then you go to let me just go to the desktop really quickly and show you some live stream and you go over here you would basically get this rar file or it will be zip no-mind and you'll have this folder over here and you just copy the entire folder folder not the contents the entire folder and then you go to this readme file you go over here the third step and you copy this command over here go to this Pilon field over here just paste the command and you have this welcome window you have three new buttons and a new shelf over here and the new three buttons so this first one launches the menu this resets and this deletes the menu not deletes it just closes it and stops everything that goes in the background great so that's very easy updating installing that's not problem if you already sold some scripts before let's go over the new features so one of the major things is warp mode warp function so those are connected but they are not the same we also have filters over here for the layers we have extraction buttons over here that can extract only selected curves or they can extract all the curves from your layers with the exception of last layer and I will explain why later and also I have updated the transfer attributes and transfer movies button and now it will work in two directions I will explain it a little bit later as well and also the big overhaul is the curve control window now it's much more usable I mean it's pretty much great right now so you will see that controls will just appear when you select the curve and it will actually no different types of curves and it will just show you the controls that available for those curves so no problem here and we'll also have some fixes over here that I will explain in the end and that's it this is the new update some use some additional options let's just dive right into the new functions so first all warp right so before this update what you need needed to do is to create a new like card right and just place it and of course texture it and stuff so the warp is the same functionality it will create a card but the big difference here let me just create two cards right next to each other so you'll know the difference between them we have to absolutely the same looking cards but let's go at the current curve control and let's explore some options right so this is the regular one the old extrude and this is the new one so extrude you remember that twisting orientation if you by the way if you have no idea what I'm talking about there is a previous video on the version 1.0 this is this video is on my youtube so you can just check it out and the link will be somewhere in the in this video or in the description so let's see twisting with and stuff like that tapering very easy we're very basic stuff but let's go to the warp right so we have orientation who have twisting right a regular one but we have now this twist curve so what it does is it allows you to control way where to twist your curve right we increase the resolution and now have the new control twist curve right and let's see look at this so it actually can control kurby sure I accidentally created a new point on any point of the curve that you want so this is extremely useful for long hair I cannot explain enough how it's useful I think you know if you made help for and you can actually add new points with no problem and a lot of points over here so any number of points just go wild now let's see next thing we have this M this is magnitude I should have probably named it better but it's one only one letter so I mean who cares just know that this is magnitude what magnitude does it basically increases the effect of this graph right so let me just accelerate a little bit so let's just make a regular twist just so you see and now I'm holding ctrl and scrolling with my right mouse button this is a regular my stuff and as you can see it increases the magnitude of this graph so I'm not touching this this twist this regular one I'm just increasing the magnitude of this graph and just like that and if you do something like this for example and increase the magnitude as you can see it only twists on the on this points over here right so this magnitude is great by default is 0.5 but you can basically increase it to any value you want and reset curve will just reset this curve to its regular it's to the default positions and default number of points so if you accidentally did something we were just reset the curve and everything is great now next thing you might think that if you have long hair you'll have you'll need this exact precision right so if you want to let me just disable this if you want to for example let's just go with this braid right and as you can see it has the same graph over here so it's great and I want to rotate only the tip over here right so it's really hard to do this on this small graph right here but what you can do it just increase this window or even better you can go ahead and about this graph like that and just do whatever you want you can even do a full screen if you just or even put it on the second monitor I don't know just it just like a regular window over here and you can just increase it ends let's go over here as you can see it mirrors the options just and let's try to twist it and as you can see I'm twisting now only the tip it's really hard to see what I'm twisting only this part so the amount of control you get is insane you can just do everything anything I mean with this graph let's just undo this so that's great now I have precise control over twist now the same thing goes for with right with gets the same graph so now you can have custom profile for your curves you can see you can have custom profile for your curves like that and basically do anything and oh of course adding new points same thing you can just pop out this graph right like that you can reset and there is no magnitude for this thing because you already have magnitude this with slider over here so it will just magnify this width and apply the corrections using this graph like that so you can magnify it and just go to a point for example right so no need for magnitudes here next thing you can actually unlock the length of your cards you can unlock lengths let me just demonstrate this really quickly so we have some random shape over here right and you can now a length and lock and what it will do if I age at this point it will not affect all of this other stuff it will remain the constant length of the based on this length slider so this is extremely useful and then I will show you why so for example you have this braid right and what I did here is I place this braid placed it first of course like that and after that I started to add those like hair strands over here around it and then after that I thought hey I actually wanted to reposition this braid right so in order to represent our position you just take the curve and move it right but the problem here is that if you move the entire curve right like it was before like this it will actually change the shape of this braid over here and it will break the sort of sort of connections here that you have with this part so when you unlock the length like that it will no longer break all right so you just you just choose the length that you need and then you can actually change only the tip over here you can change this part over here and it will not break this this already mates hair strands right here so lengths unlock is very useful and of course you have all the previous options from the extrude the regular extrude so we have profile you have on right here you have divisions you have with divisions you have orientation you have twist regular one it works independently for from twists curve and regular UVs regular solidify attribute right here it will work just like before so you can solidify basically extrude but it will extrude keeping all of the procedural over here so yeah great so that's new stuff and as you can see it basically mirrors the extrude option so you have new card new tube and the same thing goes for a new card new tube and curve card so for example you want to add more work cards well there is a formal function it was in the extrude and the same goes here you can add cars just like that as you can see it adds cars it keeps the curvature it tries to keep the orientation it actually blends all of the settings over here so yeah as you can see you can do the same of the same functionality as before and also you can convert curves or tools let's see let's create some random girl over here and rebuild it because it's a little bit dense and you can of course just convert this curve to curve card as you can see it doesn't like when you have this pinching on the first few CDs as you can see the same options same twist so fully functional you can convert any number of curves select convert smooth a little bit because this parts were here so as you can see same functionality better options it's a new warp mode just use it let's go to some more exciting stuff one point last about last point about warp and extrude why I have two modes here because extrude is faster a little bit but it's faster than warp mode over here so it's two completely different algorithms so you if you have issues with your performance you shouldn't have any issues by the way if you have decent computer but I mean you can use either of those and you'll be fine I mean all of this hair was created exclusively in work mode no extrude at all and it was perfectly fine so I just kept it just in City in case something happens with the performance nothing should happen by the way all right so work mode great so you can now create all the stuff let's go to some more exciting stuff so those are templates for this hair over here so as you can see you have braids to have all of the cards that I used for this thing and this braid whether we using this over here we have this clump of air we have another one and I'm sure you'll see the resemblance so what we can do this well we can actually control all of this all of this for example with one curve very easily let's just go to front view so we can easily create a new curve and let's just random shape it doesn't need to be in the center of the world it doesn't need to be like somewhere specific just random curve I'll just rebuild it because pencil to create some crazy series and let's select both of them so as you can see this is just curved tube it's editable it's it has all of the options over here but work what I can do right now I can just click warp and here we go it's just it's now bound to a curve and you can just easily I did it so let's go and explore some options so this warp mode it actually creates a new type of the third type of curves and they are called warp group over here in the outliner so if you need to know that I tend to not use outliner since I have those layers over here so now those original curves are disappear they disappeared and they are bound to this curve so what we can do with this thing right now first of all I want to flip the axis right flip the orientation because it actually upside down so I can just go to my curve control window over here and flip now everything seems to be fine as you can see it stretches just like the regular geometry the regular curve cards and tubes you can change orientation you can change twists using this graph you cannot change uniform twists but if you really want to you can just do something with this graph like that and it will be basically uniform twisting just increase the increase this magnitude over here so you can control twists precisely same thing goes for with you can just change with just like that and unlock length yes we have unlock lengths for that as I said this braid was created by using this method and you can unlock it a little bit and let just for example put it like that and as you can see almost nothing changes over here and you can actually move this tip over here I mean it will change a little bit there's it's inevitable but at least it will not change completely so you can actually edit those original curves without a problem let me just hide this see let's hi this there's a button here edit original curves and if you click on it it will be temporarily unbound from this original curve and if you go over here unfortunately it's still yeah if you go over here you will see that what we just put those this layer as well you will see that those curves are still there they are intact they are working they are fully functional and the cool part about this is here is look at this I will just do something like this just for demonstration purposes I will go back and everything is there everything all your edges are still here so you can just unburn unbind it again you can go over here change something or as you can see it's it has three curves right well you can originally bind any number of curves so you can have for example this base right this base from tubes and after that you can put some details on the top right some like on the dreads or something like this you can put some details on top also over here some stray hair and stuff like that and you can select everything bind it to one curve and you will still have the ability to edit it later just like that you can see it's there it will deform a little bit because well it's not like perfect but those edits well we'll be there and the more you go from the central curve on the sides the more you will see the deformation but I mean it's pretty much the same as it was when I before I actually bound it so that's new warp mode and it actually works for geometry as well so let me just demonstrate for example let's create a cylinder right just a regular while old cylinder with some height divisions and let's just scale it a little bit right I don't have this cylinder and let's just create another curve like that just warp it and of course again I accidentally selected the first layer it's now hidden so it will be hidden when I actually warp it let's just select this layer it's empty right now great let's warp it and we can see it because we have new layers new layer and now as you can see this cylinder is bound to this curve and if you are using regular geometry first thing you need to do is to combine the two one mesh so we just combined everything to one mesh and then bind if you use curves you can use any number of curves in any configuration they will all bind to one curve that you select the empty curve of course you cannot select already like used curves and not only for braids right you can actually actually use it for clumps of hair for example I just use handy lay our buttons over here and actually unhide everything I already have hidden this thing in the outliner that's why then I don't like to use outliner for this because it's actually confuses a little me a little bit when they use layers and outliner so let's explore over here let me just find this curve here we go I already found it so here we have a part of this hair over here and if you can notice it actually has a bunch of color curves attached a bunch of geometric cars I mean attached to one curve and it acts as as one curve you can twist it just like you twist one curve you can edit original curves it's by default it goes to the middle of the world so that's the compromise I had to make you cannot edit it right here you it will go straight to this meeting to this middle point but don't worry it's easy enough to edit them here as you can see actually edit tips a little bit of the air edit those after the fact when I actually placed this curve over here it's concision you can just go over here and you can go over here and edit this part to whatever you want I mean obviously this is not great and you can go back and it will transfer this edit here now it doesn't look exactly like it was before because I have with curve applied because I have this with curve applied and that's why it it looked differently but you can of course just don't use this with and it will look the same way it looked over here maybe a little bit more I mean I mean there with it's a little bit less because when a fault I think it's too great so now you can have braids that actually attached to one curve you can have clumps of hair that attach to one curve and that's drastically removes the reduces the amount of curves and variables that you need to use to create hair and this is great but as you can see I still have a lot of stray hairs over here I mean that there's just all curves with pivots somewhere reset it right so you cannot avoid it completely right now but you can really really reduce the amount of curves that you have on the first layer so that's useful I think and those graphs are great so now about layers so I've added a bunch of layer gestures that we can use so before that you had to select everything in this layer and for example hold right click and add this to this layer to this layer this there right so it's a little bit annoying and a little bit hard to do so right now you you can just avoid selection you can just hold middle mouse button and actually drag curves to a new layer just like that so you can move it between layers really easily now if you want to merge two layers together well that's that's totally doable you just hold this for example F layer and go to this sixth layer and they will be merged together into one layer just like that so that's new gestures that we have for the layers layer filters now you already saw me using them they are very very useful because you can actually hide all the curves and show on the geometry and it's very useful for preview in the viewport right so as you can see I have a lot of like curves and stuff that well I need them for control but they I don't like to see them one I would actually want to see the hair so I can just go to the Geo show only Geo as you can see those here so this will show only geometry this layer will show only curves so if you need to troubleshoot to find some weird curves like those over here for example right okay as you can see they go through the head over here you can go to curves and you can show all so it will show everything and also this new color mode but first as you can see it doesn't show you the last layer that's absolutely intentional because as you saw I used last layer for the templates so I don't want to hide them every time I use those filters right so what do you have in the options you have last group filtering and by default it's ignore filter so what group wouldn't know ignore the filtering buttons over here and you can of course just enable filtering and last layer will be absolutely the same as all of those other layers now this color mode that's a little bit hard to distinguish between layers and by the way since we are talking about distinguishing between layers I have added a new button over here that actually shows you which layer your own so I've I will select this curve right and then will show me that hey it's on the fourth layer and so we're here you can change the layer of this curve to go to let's go to layer 9 for example as you can see 9 is now lit up and this curve is now in this ninth level layer and it was removed for the from the fourth layer and same goes for like backwards you can just go backwards let's explore this color menu now as I already told you it's a little bit hard sometimes to distinguish between layers and maybe you want to share to check your movies on your cards so what you need to do is just click this color button and as you can see it will colorize all of the layers and it will colorize the geometry so well not really easily but you can actually see much better I'm fighting the layers by the way you can see you can see much easier where and which layer is based on those colors you can simply click on this layer and it will light up the curves just like that or you can just enable color mode and see that a is this blue right or put your coral color this is the same goes for other ones and you can actually randomized off colors if you don't like them and you can actually change the color of the entire layer over here for example let's just change it to something like this right so it will change the color of every layer that you select I can select everything and change everything to white for some reason and you can just click color back and it will return back your materials so everything is perfectly fine right by the way you can go to options and disable the checker let's see cool as you can see it's now have it now has this like checker material you can go disable this you can go over here and you can just go and it will go and put a plain color but without any check out materials or something like that now the extraction buttons the extraction button buttons are very useful because before in order to extract something from the layer from the your hair from your group let's just say that you had to actually go over here and click the extract geometry as you can see it extracts it this geometry or here just like that stays the same the original layer is hidden but you had to do this for each and every layer and you had to then select it and merge everything together so that was really annoying and I've added one button extract all the same thing that goes for the filters actually applies to extract all so your last layer will not be affected so extract all it will take a little bit because a lot of there's a lot of geometry and it will actually give you already merged geometry that you can easily export to marmoset for example or to Unreal Engine let's just delete it and as you can see I have deleted the hair but original hair is still there it's just hidden as you can see gray color over here you just click over here and everything is back as it was everything is editable and everything is great extract selected it's the same thing as extract all it's just it will just extract the selected curves only so I want to extract only those I will extract them and as you can see here we go and by the way I forgot to tell you about extraction so this small triangle here it means that you can actually press shift and it will change change the behavior a little bit so let's go to outliner and check it out so real like regular extraction works like that you can extract the geometry and it will give you the extracted go1 mesh right but if you want to for example extract everything but keep everything separate you can hold shift and you can click on extract and as you can see it gives you all of your layers and in all of those layers you will have all the separate geometries that were there from before and as you can see right now it's just regular geometry it's editable you can do whatever you want with it you can export it you can combine it I will just delete it and show all as you can see it's very fast right now and the same goes for extract select a tool it will give you separate mesh that's it if you use two you press shift right now transfer attributes now this thing is a very small feature but I think it will be very useful let's just hide right this and by the way as you can see on all you have the same tree triangle so normal clique will show everything and shift-click will hide everything except for the last layer of course so not transferring as you can see I've added those triangles here as well that means that if you want you can reverse the direction of transfer so before before we had this thing you selected two curves let's just turn three visits more visible transfer it is and it will it went from the first selected curve to the all of the curves in next in the selection list right so now if I select in the same order and I'll press Shift keys as you can see it will transfer UVs from the last selection to everything else so I can just go over here select all of this thing select this and this will be my last selection I press shift and I transfer everything from this point well this over here because sometimes you just it's just not really easy to select the layer that the curve that you want to transfer from first now you can do this way from last to everything else same goes for transfer attributes now pivot point before you you could only reset pivot point to the origin of the curve this square thing but now you can actually go ahead and click shift and reset pivot point to the tip of the curve that is actually very useful because you can just position your curve a little bit differently especially for those combined curves over here it's very useful I actually used it a lot when I placed those things over here as you can see we have a bunch of curves over here and I used this reset pivot point for example as you can see play pivot points now now here and I can just reposition it from this point because I want actually to this boy this point to stay in this braid oh yeah Mya 2020 UVs so if you fortunately used my 20/20 this plugin is fully supported by the way but there is a bug in the my itself so I cannot fix it because because I'm not autodesk I cannot do that but but there is a bug that actually will do that's my old project from my old I think 2019 my it will do this with your movies it will ignore all of the Yui attributes that you have in 2020 if you try to transfer your project for 2019 but don't worry there is a fix it's actually very easy you just open the plug-in options figs takes all UVs and everything magically is back you can use my 2020 as you mean as your main Maya but I don't really recommend you right now because it's it has some weird issues that I just I'm just sticking to 20 and 2019 for now 2020 it's very as you saying that not great right now but you can use it if you really want to now we have new online documentation so if everything that I say right now is not enough you can always go to this link or here and I will link it in the chat you can go to this link over here and I actually can go ahead and read installation first steps main menu everything about the main menu with categories and with curve control window with structure of the curves I'll attributes some things are animated so maybe you'll find this useful if you just can't understand what what's going on as you can see basically everything that is relevant is animated textures how to apply textures how to use UV attributes what UV attributes are doing so everything is here just go ahead and read it I think you'll find it very useful okay great online documentation and also if you still not decided about this plugin and you want to purchase it right please use please use my art station website it's the same our station that he used to you just need to put your our station email there and say you will get the purchase in your our station library later on but it actually gives me a little bit more of a revenue so it will help me support the plugin in the future thank you that's pretty much it for those plugins for the newer things everything by the way was rebuilt from almost from scratch so this version should be much faster than before and those new features I think you'll love them by the way you have help and open online documentation it will actually open this documentation for you so no need to scroll through PDFs so in the next update what I wanted to do is really get rid of those UV attributes right so if you watch the first video you actually had to tweak those attributes a little bit to set up your UVs and sometimes it it was a little bit annoying so what I wanted to do is a dedicated UV wind window just like Maya UV editor well of course it will be much simpler because why do I need to all those options here but identical window way you can just select the curve and drag like some controllers and your view is will will be set so that's one major thing in the next step the update also I had some requests for mirroring mirroring of hair so for example you have just save lists or example you have hair on this side and you can just mirror it to this site or for example like I mean hair is not really a symmetrical stuff and you shouldn't do it's in some kind of symmetry but for the first layer for if you want to start the first layer it will be very useful to just mirror flip the hairs and start from this so it will duplicate and it will flip them to the other side okay so this is it for this update if you have any issues or questions or bugs to report you can go straight to my discord or you can just contact me on our station or we via email you should have it if you have the plugin so yeah thank you for watching see you next time

Channel: George Sladkovsky

Views: 11,709

Keywords: Real-time Hair Cards, Hair Cards, Autodesk Maya, Plug-in, Script, Marmoset Toolbag, Render, Hair, Curves, Hair Curves, Turntable, Add-on, Game Hair, Tutorial, Livestream, Update, Free Update, Major Update

Id: ePL5TSdkeic

Length: 38min 18sec (2298 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020