What's the state of the art fur system in Maya?

[Pancho]

I just know of nHair, xgen and yeti, but don't have any idea which one to aim for. Anybody any production insights? I guess Yeti is pretty close to my own ICE fur system, so it might feel nice, but I have no idea about the pros and cons. I'll be able to use VRay for Maya 3.0 soon and RS already. Unfortunately RS currently only renders Maya's nHair, but this might change sooner or later.


Cheers
Thomas

[Helli]

xgen is good for gras, short fur, feathers and stuff.
But if you want to combine combing and curves for stylings thats just not possible.
And as far as I know it only support mental ray and Arnold for rendering (so no vray).

yeti is quite cool, guides are not dependend on geometry. So you are not forced to only use vertex positions for guides, you can freely add guides on the surface.
Layering of stylings is possible and quite straight forward. A nodebased workflow will help you to layer and go more in depth after your combing.
Haven't tried it indepth tough.
But yetis node system is by far different then ice. You got some nodes which you can use for styling and layering but don't think you will be able to build something like you can in ice.

nHair imho isn't that good, felt quite clunky for grooming, but haven't tried it indepth.

What you forgot is Shave & Haircut.
Which is a plugin and therefore avaible in its latest build (not like xsi were it's still V2 or so).
Shave&Haircut is quite okey I guess, question is if it can hold up with yeti.

So if I would be you, I would try out Yeti first.

[luceric]

xgen does not just short hair, but long hair and styling... very long hair if you take into account the movie Tangled..
but it doesn't do dynamics. you'd use xgen in conjunction with nHair

[Mathaeus]

For short hair or fur, I'd also give a chance to Yeti, simply because creators of 3rd party plugin, should be interested to provide as much complete, streamlined solution. For my taste, implementation of xGen thing looks like plain copy paste of all what AD bought. You never know at which point you have to call the programmer.
For long, complex styles, I'd ask these guys - they selling this for very affordable price.
Regarding Tangled and Pixar, actually this is a very simple style, could be created with anything able to split into enough segments ( that is, only Shave can't do that)... if you have enough of human power on dispose. For newer Pixar movie, one with curly red hair puppet, they admit into their advertising, that curls were created manually, during months... And all that PIxar's puppetry doesn't like believable, nowhere close to standard Blur's game cinematic, or like.