From the course: Maya: nHair

Understanding Nucleus nHair - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: nHair

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Understanding Nucleus nHair

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nHair is Maya's advanced system for dynamic hair rendering. Because it's part of the Nucleus framework, nHair can collide and interact with other Nucleus objects, including passive colliders, nCloth, and nParticles. This gives us the ability to achieve advanced effects that were not possible with the Classic Hair system. Speaking of Classic Hair, it still exists in Maya. The hairSystem shape node has been upgraded to take advantage of Nucleus, but the old attributes and capabilities have not been removed. This means you can easily convert Classic Hair to nHair and vice-versa. However, going forward, there's no compelling reason to use Classic Hair anymore, because nHair is simply faster and better. nHair can be applied to both polygons and NURBS surfaces, but effectively, you'll want to use polygons, for two reasons. First, if you want the hair to collide with an object on which it's growing, that I call the emitter, then that object will need to be a polygon mesh. Nucleus passive colliders have to be polygons. Second, nHair relies on the UV layout of the emitting object. Proper placement of nHair follicles and usage of the Paint Follicles tool require that the emitter has good UVs. NURBS objects don't have much control over UV placement, because the UVs are inherent in the surface. So, with NURBS, you may experience issues such as uneven distribution of nHair follicles. That's just a brief overview of how nHair works. Let's go ahead and get started by loading some examples.

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