‘Hair 3ds Max… out of the box’ is a downloadable set of DVD-based tutorials from Joe Gunn that takes you through the workflow of Max‘s native Hair Modifier.

The main part of the part of the disc lasts just over five hours, during which Joe shows how to set up and style several haircuts for rigged characters. He suggests work pipelines that he has used on various jobs, talks about shading, use of texture maps for setting Hair Density, applying Physics and Disk Caching to speed up solving, all with a nice, clear and easy-to-follow narration. On top of this are some bonus tutorials showing how to drive a ponytail with Cloth Dynamics and a runthrough of the creation of the hair on the disc’s cover image.

Joe has clearly used hair a lot and likes the way his chosen pipeline works, his demonstration also suggests that he gets a lot of joy from hairdressing, twisting and tweaking the style until he is happy with it.

Despite Joe‘s decent delivery and passion, for the subject matter I did find them a bit repetitive and lacking in variation, quite a bit of time is spent going back and forth with the same tools. Once the tools were covered I could have done with less fine tuning and more examples of variation – short, long, spiky, afro etc.

When I first started watching the tutorials I thought it was going to be pitched at quite an advanced level as the immediate introduction of scripts, Custom UI’s and so forth would probably baffle a new user. But then once the hair tutorials got going I found myself a little frustrated by the lack of advanced techniques or solutions to the various issues I‘ve found when using these Modifiers myself.

My main gripe was the use of cartoon characters throughout the tutorials; glowing skinned puppets do not really provide a suitable base for everyday hair use. The major issues of blending hair in to the scalp and solving shadow issues couldn‘t be visualised against such a canvas. The cartoony look also didn‘t lend itself to creating realistic hair, if Joe had made the hair bright blue it would have looked just as good but again, without a believable face, you can‘t judge whether the hair colours, specularity, frizzyness and so forth are right. On top of this the suggestion that you just use one spotlight is incredibly impractical in terms of matching hair to a scene. Greater depth in rendering realism, lighting and perhaps some examples of fur would really improve this DVD.

If you‘re new to the Hair modifier and not scared of customising Max first, then this is a good place to start, but you‘ll need to look elsewhere or experiment yourself if you want to tackle more realistic hairdressing.

Verdict:
An interesting look at a professional hair pipeline, but the training could benefit from more variation and realistic results.

Score: 6/10

Details:
Intermediate level DVD training
Runtime – 5 hours 12 minutes

$69.95 / €51 / £45

Contents:
Overview
UI Setup Maxscripts Workflow
Modifier Overview
Grooming pipeline
Styling 1 & 2
Materials and Maps
Dynamics and Collision objects
Lighting and Rendering

Bonus – Cloth Driven Dynamics
Making the cover image

Publisher – joegunn3d.com

Author – Joe Gunn