CIG Hair Tool Development

I was tasked with improving our character’s hair in 2019. CIG had previously used an outsource company for the hair assets and the results were looking dated.

After some research, I decided to base hair grooming on cards that were shaped by curves. I went to our company’s tools programmer and asked for a tool that could organize a set of cards and had an implementation of 3ds max’s path deform in Maya. Fast forward a few months and we have our custom hair grooming tool in Maya.

In our current pipeline, we start with an XGen groom. From that we derive a set of useful curves. Then we use the custom tool to organizes our hair cards and select curves and assign cards to those curves. The tool also has many functions built in to help us select, model, organize and visualize those curves and cards.

After this tool was created by our Maya developer, I field tested it by making two hair styles. Then I trained all the senior artists on how to use it and then created a set of training videos for future artists who wanted to learn it. So far our team has created 15 hairstyles with this tool.

I am not a programmer and did not write any code, but the idea for the tool and how it works came from me. The programmers that created this tool are Rob Dickerson, our tools developer and Nico Schulz, our shader and gfx developer.

I’m proud of my work on the CIG hair pipeline. We went from zero artists at our company having created real-time hair to having a pipeline, a groom tool, and a character team trained to make game hair.

Maya Screenshots of Hair Tool