Curve Fill

Overview

If you're into grooming, you might find that your curves from tubes, cards, or the ones you placed by hand just aren't enough. Instead of adding more curves manually, you can use the Curve Fill tool to help generating extra curves from your existing shell curves. This makes hair distribution way faster and easier.

Tube

To extract a center curve from selected curves, use the 'Set and Generate Center Curve' button.

Note that creating a new center curve will replace the previous one.

To create a unique center curve, select your curves and click "Create Unique Center Curve." Each new curve will be named "xgtCenterCurve_unique**".

Create an unique center curve from selected curves.

Enable the "Create From Groups" checkbox if you have groups of curves, (curves within Maya group node) and want to generate them simultaneously.

Generate a center curve for each curve 'group'.

To fill in curves based on a volume of curves

1. Select the 'outer' curves in either a clockwise or counterclockwise order and then click on "Generate Center Curve". This will create a curve named "xgtCenterCurve".

Select curves shells clockwise or counter-clockwise fashion.

1. Align the curve's control vertices (CVs) for an optimal fit to the center of the overall shape. The image below shows manual moving CVs, but you can also use the Sculpt Tool from the Interactive Curve Tools.

Moving the center curve into position (usually somewhere in the middle), will produce best result.

3. You can then fill in one layer of curves at a time with the “Fill” button

• Distance - is the distance from the “center curve” to be filled in from

• Offset - if you would like the new curve to be placed in the ‘middle’ of the outer curves, leave offset at 0.5

Fill in curves with distance and offset controls.

1. Set the number of layers and use the 'Auto Fill' to generate layers of curves starting from the center curve.

Auto Fill will fill curves.

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Card

Number of Curves: Defines the number of interpolated curves

Select a curves and fill in curves in between.

​Delete Original Middle Curves: Enabling this option will remove the original middle curves after creation if they are not needed.

Delete Original Middle Curves on, will remove all the 'original middle curves'.

Respect Selection Counts: Enable this feature to group selected curves into batches, based on the order of selection. For instance, if you select 4 curves and set the count to 2, the first two curves form one batch, and the remaining two form another batch. When do you use this tool.

Respect Selection Counts.

To generate a different number of curves for inner layers, use the 'Select Every Other Curve on List' button. This selects half of the curves defined. Click 'Generate Center Curve' to update the curve amount accordingly.

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