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

[Music] hello everyone my name is george slatkowski and today we are looking at a new update for my plugin for maya js curve tools version 1.2 yes the update update is finally here and there's a lot to cover so let's just get started so first of all this update is free for everyone who bought this plugin before so it's a free update and in order to download it you just need to go to your marketplace of choice and go to your profile and just download it from there it's already there by the time this video is out how to update to a new version or how to install this plugin like the first time so let's just switch to another uh version of my over here this is 2019 and by the way 2022 is uh supported as well so but let's switch to this version over here and let's go and see how this will look so when you download this you'll get a um zip uh file over here and all you need to do is to unpack it somewhere and you'll you'll get this folder so what you need to do is to copy this folder just copy this folder to script folder of maya and the this scripts folder is in documents maya your version of maya and scripts not the shared scripts folder over here only in the folder where your version of my is and scripts folder and what you need to do is simply copy this folder over here open this folder open readme and there is a command over here that you need to copy go to your maya and just switch to python over here or paste it in the script editor over here just switch to python and click enter over here as you can see initialized successfully all the hotkeys are there everything is there and there is a small visual glitch in maya but you have three buttons over here so first one will launch the menu over here just like that second one reset will reset everything to defaults in case something is wrong and the third one will just close the window and close all the background processes that this plugin might start so if anything goes wrong just delete and start the new window over here and to update same process just delete the old folder paste the new folder and paste the command that's it so just a quick note about this version of curve tools although it is backwards compatible with old previous versions and the previous projects it is still recommended to first finish your current project in the previous version and then update it to this new version just in case although i've tested it and it is backwards compatible just be careful and finish your current project in the old version so now that we installed the plugin let's just run it with this first button i've changed the scaling of maya for you to see better on small screens so here's the new interface looks similar to the previous one but it's actually now stretches and scales properly and high dpi support should be much better now including mac os so let's go through the interface really quickly so on the top you have three buttons options helping about options hold all of the options that are available for this plugin also some additional functions over here you have a creation section where you create new cars over here you have layer section over here you have some selection and grouping utilities here you can transfer uvs and transfer attributes just like the in the previous version over here you have your utility section with smoothing a new mirroring section over here you can open up open it up like that and also new button over here on the bottom a uv editor you'll see what it is a little bit later so this is the new interface everything was updated to this new style and i hope you like it including the curve control and randomize everything everything was updated so the big rework in this version is bind and unbind function now you uh in the previous version this was called warp function but i chose to rename it to bind and we also have a new function unbind so you might already guess what it will do from the name but let's just demonstrate it really quickly let's go to a front view and let's create a new curve over here just like that let's rebuild it really quickly so it doesn't have to be straight or anything it's just like random curve over here and let's select this braid right and let's just bind it to this curve so let's bind it and you will see it that yes now it was bound to this curve and if you try to move the curve it is now moving the braid with it but what is this new unbind button well it just unbinds this curve from this braid and return you back your original curves so let's just unbind it now you'll see that it's now in the center of the scene over here because well that's the where it will be by default and you will see that you have this empty curve over here that is just regular maya curve nothing special about it you have your old curves back so you can edit them however you want and you can actually bind it back with no problem as you can see now it's bound back to this thing and that's it now let's unbind it again and for example i don't really like how it looks and i want to add something special to it right let's just duplicate this curve over here and let's add it over here just like that now i don't know why we would want to do something like that but this is just a demonstration so let's duplicate it again and again and as you saw i just unbound this uh complex shape from this curve so now i'll just select everything over here including those new curves and i will just bind it back to this uh over here as you can see it's it's although it's flipped in the world i can just change it really quickly like that flip it so now you will notice that those new cards that i've added there are also added to this new complex shape and they are also controlled using this all one curve over here so now whenever you want to change something on your model you can just unbind the previous version over here and get your curves back just like that change them somehow for example i want to basically delete come on delete this card over here just like that i have only two cards left cards left i just go and bind them back just like that and you'll see that there there's only two cars here so now you can do whatever you want with your models buying done by and this is completely reversible process so you can do this anytime you want the only limitation is that it will just snap to the center of the scene like that every time because well under the hood it's in the middle of the scene just like just there so yeah so now yeah you might ask well will i get back my properties on this curve over here if i unbind it and then bind this again well yes of course curve will now remember all of the properties all of the attributes that you have on the on it and when you bind it back all the properties will just apply to this thing again so for example let me change the width of this thing just like that and it will go to a point basically over here right so let's close this let's unbind now as you can see it's just the default one over here and now let's select this back again and bind it back and you will see that it still goes to a point just like it was before and if you look at the graph it's the same graph as it was before although you unbound it it will still remember your settings now another big thing about bind is now we have a special mode for bind if we hold shift and click bind just like that what it will do it will leave the original curves behind and it will bind a copy to this curve so you will have all of the things left behind just like that and you can still edit them just as easily like that and you will just have additional collection of curves that was bound to this other curve so hold shift or use option in duplicate curve curves before bind in the options so another interesting thing that was added in this version is fill this is a new function it is similar to add cart and odd tube but the difference here is that fill will also work on those complex bound curves so what will feel phil will do is simply duplicate this thing and basically multiply it in between two selected or two or more selected cards so let me just demonstrate it let's duplicate this one and this one and let's just duplicate it again we have three cards just like that and those are complex uh shapes that i showed you before so it consists of multiple curves so let's just now select them in this order and press fill and what you will see that it will just fill the space in between those curves it will smoothly interpolate between them and it will also blend the all the properties that you have on those curves just like add cart and at tube so let's undo this and it is controlled by this add slider over here so you can just change it to whatever you want for example if you have only one it will just add one in between each layer and if you have if you want to do more it will add more and also if you have some complex shape like that for example let me just change it something to something like this just like that and then i select them in this order and i will click fill and what will what it will do it will just smoothly interpolate between those shapes and you will have a smooth transition so for example i have two braids over here and uh let's say i want to add a one additional braid in between of those uh two well what can i do i can basically duplicate them like uh just like that and duplicate and then move them somehow right so that's quick enough but what i will want to do here is to select both of them and add one in between just like that as you can see it will now add this thing in between and if i want to do the same with for example this one let's just do this and fill and you'll see it will actually create it inside of the head because it tries to interplay between those two but as you can see it actually added this braid following the shape of the head because those two follow the shape of the head but it created it really nicely just like that so another new function in this version is subdivide so for example i have a card over here just a simple card and if i just select it and click on subdivide it will subdivide this card into three cards just like that it will blend their attributes between them and it will also subdivide the number of times that you have selected here in this add slider so for example let me let me just undo this and i will select only two and you will see that we have two subdivisions over here so you might have noticed a small error that appeared when i subdivided this curve it can be ignored because it's just maya having trouble with some of the functions that i used with this subdivision uh it does not affect this function in any way so just ignore them so now that we have two cards what we can do in we can subdivide them even more just like that now they are subdivided into four cards and as you see they are basically mirroring the original card but they are just subdivided like that and of course they are fully functional functional cards you can just change width of them just like that or take one of them again and subdivide it again just like that and basically increase the density of the cards on your uh in your project just like that now with the subdivide you can optionally leave the original curve behind if you click shift while subdivide what it will do it will leave the original card behind and it will just add two smaller cards on top of it so this can be a nice uh weight to to increase the density of hair um on your in your project as well so another new function in this version is card to curve so what it will do it will uh take flat cards one-sided cards geometry cards and it will try to turn them into curves so let me just demonstrate this really quickly for example i will extract selected this is the part of this groom over here and you will see that if i hide this layer you'll see that now i'm left with a bunch of one-sided cards over there and unfortunately they are just a regular old geometry not curves you cannot control them anyway uh because you already extracted them but now what we can do is we can select them and we can click cart to curve and what it will do it will analyze those this geometry now remember they should be separated not one big chunk they should be separated and you what you will get a bunch of curves that follow the original geometry just like that and now you can in theory just go to and convert them to curves just like that and you can see that now they are converted to controllable of cards now this is not a solution to every problem because as you can see they lack the attributes that you had before over here but at least you now have those curves that you can work with it's a limited functionality but you can convert geometry to curves so now let's talk about the new attributes that were added in this version so uh warp cars were reworked a little bit and now they have a bunch of interesting features and let's just open our curve control window and let's create a default card in some kind of layer over here let's put it over there and now you will see that most of the attributes are the same so i'll division double division orientation twist but we now have an inverted twist now first when i have added this function i thought that it will not be as useful but honestly it's very nice to have so let's see twist we'll twist the tip of the card over here just like that it will twist it and invert the twist will twist the root part over here this is very very useful when you try to align some of the cars near the scalp and you just like twist them just like that a little bit let me just disable it so we can see better you try to twist it a little bit just to conform to the scalp a little bit better and honestly this is a very very useful attribute and now you can use it with warp cards freely now the next attribute here is a graph a profile curve graph and if you worked with curve tools before you know that we have this profile right let me just increase the resolution so so you can see better so we have this profile that can change the how the curve look just like that but before this version we could not control this profile along the curve now this was an unfortunate limitation but now it's gone now we have this profile curve graph over here let's see how it works now you might notice that we have quite a bit of points here um comparing comparing to the width and twist graph over here but this is an intentional thing because it works a little bit differently and let's try to move some points and let's just move this point to zero for example and you will see that now your profile is now scaled using this graph just like that and now you can just do something like this for example just make something like this and we have smoothing over here you can smooth your transition over here as well and now you will have your card follow this curve over here as you can see now by default those points are you cannot move them horizontally there is a reason for that there is a technical reason for that why you cannot do this horizontal uh change but you still can add new points without a problem and you can just tailor the profile however you want and also smooth it using this smooth slider over here so you can also just delete the points just as easily no problem in this and change the card to your liking just like that and of course reset curve to set it to the default position as well so now you can control profile of the curve as before it's only available for warp cards extrude cards are not changed in this version whatsoever but they are extremely fast so if you if you have some performance issues you can use those but warp is the default cars right now and also we have this magnitude over here it's similar to the twist magnitude so you can just for example do something like this and then to change this effect of this graph on the curve and as you can see it even goes beyond it and inverts it when you go more than one for example and you can just change it to zero and at zero it will basically disable this graph so default is one just like that now this small auto and manual switch over here you will see you can disable this automatic scaling of those points automatic equalization of those points along this curve this will have a negative effect on some parts but you can do that for example if i disable this and go to manual and if i put this point over here you will see it will also stretches and compresses the geometry as well so this is a technical limitation current limitation but you can of course disable and uh this and do something with it if you want but the issue here is that if you enable the colorize mode and enable and fire and look at your uvs you will see that uvs are stretched and compressed as well so maybe you you will want that for some reason but by default it goes to auto and it will equalize this curve automatically you can of course do the manual equalization using this button just like that so this is the notation but this is a very useful function function because now you have control over the profile of your card so the last but definitely not the least attribute change is h flip uv let me just demonstrate it let me take this card over here put it on some layer and hide everything especially the last layer over here so let's see now i have this card just like that and you'll see that this hair over here this strand of hair over here on the left side and if i flip it horizontally you'll see that it will just go to the other side so it's a minor change but it allows you to mix and match those horizontal flips flip cards with normal cards and basically increase the variety of your texture so going back to uv attributes you might notice that we have two attributes missing rotate tip and rotate root uvs as uv so they were deprecated and the reason for that is we now have a new uv editor window so they are no longer needed now we have dedicated uv editor and it is much better so let me just demonstrate let's just close this curve control window so let's go ahead and open this uv editor window when you open it you will see that on the right over here you have your viewport and on the left you have your functions and your list of selected uvs over here so first of all the control to control the viewport it's the same uh like in my middle mouse button will pan it uh alt and right click drag will zoom it just like that and also scroll wheel will zoom this as well so as you can see it will change very easily just like that and you'll see that we have a bunch of rectangles over here those represent your uvs for each card you select for example i have every template that i have selected over here and as you can see those are the rectangles that represent represent their uvs let's select only one just you'll see better and you'll see that now we have this only one rectangle that represents this card over here so when you create your first card and apply texture to it you might see something like this your texture map over here and this rectangle that is your uv for this card so right now it's positioned in the default position over here this small rectangle represents the root position for this for this map but my textures are upside down that's just how i render my hair and let's just position this uv real quickly and i will show you all of the functions that you have here now just a quick note about the uv editor right now it only supports jpeg png and targa tga formats for your textures so if you have something like psd or something else it will not show up as the texture map over here you'll still have your uv rectangles over here all right but it will not show the textures so it is recommended to use png jpeg or tga textures for your viewport for maya work right so you can then use anything else if you need in the engine or marvel setters or whatever you want but in maya it is recommended to use those three formats so first of all you need to select your uv map so you can press q or just press on this button select and select your uv map with the left mouse button just like that now you need to move it press w or move or press on this move button and you can now move your uv map just like that with no problem you can also rotate your review map using e or button or this rotation button over here and if you press shift and rotate alt shift and rotate it will snap to 15 degrees increments just like that so you will have a nice control over this orientation over here also we have scale uh we can scale horizontally and if we press r again we will we will go to vertical scale just like that so we can easily switch between them or you can just press on those buttons individually like that but i prefer hotkey method and now we can just rotate it to this map over here position this this something like that scale horizontally and scale vertically and that's it we have our map set up just like that in a few seconds now other than that we have a draw command over here and let me just select a bunch of cards to demonstrate so we have two cards over here i will select them both just like that and then switch to draw function or press d on your keyboard and now i can just start drawing my uv card just like that and you see that it will change every selected card to this shape that i just drawn now you'll see that it goes the rotation goes to default position to zero position that's intended but the cool thing is you can just vertically flip this map press pressing v or v flip uv just like that and it will flip to the correct position for my texture map just like that v and it flipped to this position now you already saw a horizontal flip uv in the curve control window uh the same function is present here you can just press h and horizontally flip your selected uvs just like that just like that you see and when you horizontally flip your uv map you'll see that a dot appears over here to indicate that this map was flipped just for you to know that it is flipped you can also easily reset the uvs to the the default position press x to reset it to the default position and start again if you made some mistakes along the way just like that and and then reset again so other minor functions are focus view i select select and show all so for example uh if i go somewhere somewhere outside this uv map i can just press f and it will go back to this map over here with no problem or i can for example select multiple multiple cards press f and it will focus my view to those selected cards just like that so it's very easy to control now next functions are connected to this uv list so you will see that the more cards you select the more names you will get on this uv list just like that and this is actually your visibility filter so you can select separate uvs in your selection list just like that or just drag it and select a bunch of them or use your keyboard to flip between them so you can easily control visibility like that or you can for example isolate select someone some of them for example i want to select all of them and let's see i want to isolate select only those two cards just like that i will select them isolate and you see they are now isolated in this view and i will not see any other card cards i will just set up my uvs normally just like that and then i will reset this map for example and then show all and it will show all maps back you can also isolate using this list as i already said before so another huge feature for this uv editor is that you can now edit your bound cards with no issues so before when you had some complex shape for example like this braid over here let's just minimize it so as you can see it actually it's actually one curve but it controls three curves underneath that make this braid it's it's something like this right before you couldn't edit the original curves without going to control a curve control window and pressing this edit original object button and it will uh temporarily unbind let me just hide everything else except for this layer and with it will temporarily unbind the cards over here and you can just go to your curve control window and change the attributes over here so this is all in the past now you can just go let me just move it back now you can just select this card go to your uv editor and you will see that we have braid this is the name of this shape and you can also see that we have components now this is my names it will not be named like this by default but you can also of course rename it to every anything you want so as you can see we have this braid one and here we go this braid one but the cool part is we have three components over here and they are individually editable so if i go to move and start to move them you will see on the viewport over here that we can now edit individual parts with no problem and of course any number of parts um can be edited like that so for example we have the this clump of hair over here that consists of three uh normal hair cards like that but we have three here and they all controlled by one curve but we can individually edit their uvs if we isolate select like that or if we just show them all and just edit them like that with no problem so this is a very powerful feature you don't need to go back to old sliders and you don't need to struggle anymore with your uvs now the most powerful thing for this uv editor is that now you can actually switch uvs completely if you change your texture map for example and some of those uvs some of this strands strands of hair are moved a little bit now you can simply reposition your uvs and that's it and it will just work so let's just unhide our model over here show all and we'll see that we have all of those cards and if i select all of them you'll see that it's actually quite a few cards over here as you can see a lot of them over here but the cool thing is you can just edit them like a one card you can just select everything just like that and for example move somewhere and you will see that everything move moved with uh this edit over here let's just select it again move it back just like that and we are back to our original position with no problem you can of course select a bunch of cards individually and edit them as well with no problem you will see that they will just update in the viewport just like that so this is a very powerful editor it's very simple but very powerful and useful so now let's talk about some layer changes over here in this new version we actually have access to more layers than before so now if we go to our options menu over here you'll see that we have layer options over here and we have a bunch of things that we can change for example we can use 20 30 or 40 layers and as you can see we will now have those layers in the main main menu when we switch between them just like that very easy and also we can now choose to use only numeric values for the layers for example we have had 0 9 and a to j that's that was the default one but now we can just use numeric values like that and as you can see they now change to 10 to 19 with no problem and we also can increase number of layers just like that so now you have twice as many layers to work with and i hope you this will be very useful for you now a new feature with the layers is uh it now supports alt button and when you hold alt button what it will do it will hide and show your layer that you click on just like that as you can see i'm hiding and showing really quickly and this allows me to isolate some parts really quickly with no issues as you can see just like that and just hold alt and it will show and hide layers this is very useful so another very powerful organization uh feature in this new version is regroup by layer so as you can see in the outliner i have city layer and i have from the numbers from 0 to 19 and you'll see that i also have nice colors attached to them so this is the automatic function in the new version you can just regroup by layer and you can also enter your name over here for each layer so for example regroup by layer will basically what it will do it will create those default layers but if i uh change this to for example here group by layer and you will see that here is now the default name and also this is the number of uh the id of this of this layer 0 to 19 over here so about the colors now you can synchronize colors of your layers to the colors of your group over here so for example if i change to color over here you'll see that i have those colors over here and they are actually in sync with this uh outliner grouping now this synchronization is not the default behavior but you can change it in the options you just open your options menu and you will see that we have sync curve color to layer color and colorize regrouped layers so this is the option that you want it's by default off but if you enable it you will have the colors over here in the outliner so if i disable it and regroup you'll see that we have the default color and if i enable it and regroup you'll see that i have now those nice colors over here now of course we have our colorize mode over here it was there before but now we have some additional options that can be uh used with it so we have our randomized colors that was there before and we'll just randomize those colors for you just like that with no problem as you can see colors changing and if we're a group now those colors will change as well but what we can do now we can actually sync as you can see um we i have those colors on the curves we can now sync those colors of the layers to the colors of the curves themselves for example right click on this color and apply curve color over here and as you can see it will change so for example i will disable this thing i will reset and if i apply them to layers you will see randomize apply and it will change the co the colors of the curves based on the colors of the layers now as you saw you can actually enable this synchronization option over here and it will do this automatically each time you randomize the colors you will see that it will update the curves over here just like that and if i switch to wireframe view just like that you'll see that we have nice colors to distinguish between layers now what we also have is a new color editor now if we open custom color window over here in this marking menu you'll see this uh rather huge menu but don't be afraid of it it's very simple all you have here is all of your 40 layers over here with the colors color pickers over here randomize and reset button button for each layer gradient and randomized generators over here and also some functions over here so let's start from the simple things i want to generate a gradient for my layers and apply them to my cards so as you saw i have synchronization enabled i will just generate gradient to for example put in layers something like that just like that and i will apply them to my cards over here so set to layers as you can see it now applied here i will regroup my layers to see the gradient over here and all of my colors are now based on this color scheme over here you can also change every individual color to anything you want this is not a problem or you can just randomize it like that or reset it just like that now you can also store a preset for example i really like this version and i will just save as preset and now it will be available as a preset for every uh project that you open from from now on so what you need to do now i will just reset all and i will press load preset and it will load those colors from any project that you open now if you open your project and you have some kind of interesting color scheme set up there but you don't have this preset you can go and go ahead and get from layers so you if you press this get from layers it will take all of the colors from your layers and it will put it in this editor for you to change and you can now save it as preset just like that and of course reset all will just reset them back to the default and if you accidentally set these two layers you will see that nothing is now colorized you'll just you can just load preset and set two layers and now you have your colors back just like that now the last thing here is randomize and you have two controls over here saturation minimum saturation maximum by default it will it goes from 0.8 1 and if you randomize u2 it will just randomize each and every color over here and you can just set two layers after that if you like this random color scheme over here just like that and of course you can change saturation from zero to one but you'll have some dull colors i don't recommend it just go with some uh brighter colors and it will look better in the viewport like that set the layers save as preset and we are good to go so one of the last things in this update is mirroring now this is not a fully fledged mirror like you'll you'll find in maya but it is compatible with all of the curves and you can easily mirror them across the world axis with no problem so for example i have this small menu over here you can open and close it just like that and if i want for example to mirror some of the cards let's just hide everything and for example show only these cards just like that and i will select this card right and i will mirror it over x-axis and you'll see that it's now on the other side just like that now there are some issues with this mirroring uh the orientation can be a little bit different because based on the position uh in space this is the this is only an issue with warp cards extrude cars have no such issues it they will mirror perfectly every time but just something to note that uh mirroring is not perfect it will it will allow you to mirror the curves to the other side but you will you might want to change the orientation manually because it does not work perfectly every time this is the limitation of warp mode and there's nothing you can do about it because it's uh how michael calculates some of the parameters inside it and well there's nothing you can do about it so you have two functions here you can mirror and you can flip for example if you don't want to copy this curve and you just want to flip it on the other side you can just press flip x and it will flip it to the other side and change the orientation really quickly the same thing with mirror if you want to mirror it it will mirror it to the other side and now the last function in this update it is hidden in the options over here import and export curves now this is a very powerful feature using this feature you can actually transfer your cards and templates and stuff like that between projects very easily so for example i want this uh braid right this template for a braid in the other project right so i will select it i will click export curves and i will for example save it on my desktop just like that and save it right so now we have those things saved now if i want to create a new scene don't save i want to import curves and one two three import it and you will see that if i look and find them they are now imported in these new uh untitled documents right in the layer that they were before with no problem also with the texture that they had when i actually exported them now those buttons only work together so do not try to import other projects using this import curves curves uh button or something like that only use export and import together if you try to import some other projects something unexpected might happen and just a warning use it use them together so that was the last function in this update let's just quickly go through the options that we have here but now you have the ability to sync outliner and layer visibility so for example when you show or hide layer it will also look at this it will also show and hide stuff in the outliner so if you want to use outliner for that it will be synchronized and what that means is that when you actually hide this for example template layer right and you press f it will not register this layer over here because before that let me just disable this sync before that when i hide it hide it here and press f it actually thinks that there is something there and it actually focuses on everything and i don't want that so let me let me enable sync outliner and press alt click over here and now i can focus on my model without this template layer very useful now we already talked about keel keep curve attributes in our bind and bind section now bound curves follow parent that is a default option so if you have your bound curves and they're in the layer and you move this layer with your middle mouse button or if you simply select those cards and move them use using add selection to layer just like that they actually they will actually drag with them with them all of the uh child cards that they have so there will be no cards left in the previous layer and if you for example disable this right you can move the main card the main curve to this layer but all the children will be left in this previous layer and this can cause some confusion but if this is something you want there is an option to disable this follow parent theme now duplicate curves before buying we already talked about you can either press shift or enable this option to duplicate them so this is it for the options so this will be it for this update video for gs curve tools with version 1.2 i hope you enjoyed it and you i hope you you will use all of the new features and functions especially this uv editor that was specifically created for cryptos and you also you'll find every single link in the description also all the time stamps and all the useful links um will be there as well and yeah so thank you for watching i hope you will enjoy this and have a great day you

Channel: George Sladkovsky

Views: 8,933

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: 1Sxinan3icY

Length: 46min 43sec (2803 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021