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Hi all,

just to let you know, I'm working on new version of Kristinka Hair.

Basic new feature is a complete new way of guides-filler relationship, which I'm planning for a long time. In old one, hair filler was searching for three closest guides and interpolated in between.
Now it's a kind of reverse process, first Point Cloud emits a three guides at triangle corners, then filler just creates points and strands in 'chunks' in between. Side effect of this is:
1: 'clear' interpolation, also splitting between the styling operators
2: ability to do everything in single ICE tree
3: speed, especially on high hair counts, let's say it's about 2-5 times faster (if hair filler is the last operator)
4: nice emission from meshes too, for now only triangulated ones
5: ability to paint emission density by 'chunks' without deleting points/strands
6: much more user friendly (at least I think so)
7: no more disappearing of filler strands in Mental Ray renders ( at least I hope so )

Drawback is a bit weird way of attaching to mesh stripes/tubes (three guides should go to one stripe/tube), but I think I've founded a nice way for this.

I'm also trying to consolidate everything, for now 'hair' and 'fur' is the same thing, there is just one 'big' Follow NURBS node with all functions of previous two, what is called 'Simple Hair', serves as fur too. Still there will be a few emission types, from high segments counts for long hair, to low counts for short hair/fur, but user should be able to change these ways in the same ICE tree.

From styling stuff, there is a new node that interpolates in between (at least three) curves, but also is able to interpolate 'around' the emitter, not just linearly. Also I hope there will be a 'Curls Advanced' node, able to 'curl back' (like Claudia Cardinalle in Once Upon a Time in the West) - existing one just pushes the strands in local space.

In picture, there is 'In Between Curves' in 'around' mode, all that mass is done just with 4 curves, without any additional PPG adjusting. Also kH Grouping node on emission from triangulated mesh.

I hope I'll put it on the road in next 10-30 days. Everything is changed, there is still a lot for testing.

Thanks for your time and dedication.
Really appreciated.

Looks great! Can't wait to try it out - if you need any early testing be happy to help!

Hi Anto,
KH2's a killer toolkit already. Looking forward to that, very appreciated!

Hmmm, great news obviously, but I've moved this thread to our Announcement forum. When the tool is ready, please "feel free" ( ) to start a new thread in the ICE Compounds forum...
I appended "announced" to the title of the thread to prematurely
distinguish it from the upcoming "Kristinka Hair 3.0" release thread.
;)

I'll follow this for sure , thx for your work, it's incredible

thank you man for your grate effort .

nice to see kH evolving like that! Thanks for all your effort Anto!

Thank you! This is great news.

Wonderful! This is by far my favorite add on to XSI. I use it quite often and get very excited on news of updates.

Thank You all !

Just a few details about new emission from meshes. Basically it emits from - node location (polygon corners), then it does sorting by initialized polygon index, in order to find the points which belongs to same polygon. Virtually moving the points by accompanying polygon ID, then searching just a few closest points, seems to be a much faster than building an array and handling with array. So I think I'll stay with this method. Rock solid emission from NURBS, where triangles are created by a simple math, is still there.

So, user will be able to edit the emitter mesh on the fly. This works surprisingly nice, btw. In picture, there are a few available options: 1 and 2 is equal count by polygons, 3 is relative to polygon area, but modified by weight map.

Even it's able use quads or more, I'll stay with triangles for long-hair-emission, as it is more comfortable for all stuff that coming later. For short hairs (less strand segments and simple styling, more polygons on emitter), there is a 'Simple Hair' emission, able to emit from any kind of poly.

Kristinka Hair 3.0 has been released. The release thread can be found here
;)