Layer System and Shaders

The Hair Tube Builder offers layer management which allows you to manage your hair tube strands using Maya Display Layers built in into the main UI.

Each layer represents a shader. Which means, every tube in that layer will be assigned to the same shader.

By default, when a layer is created, a lambert shader with a random solid color will be assigned.

Moving strands to another layer

When a hair tube strand is moved from one layer to another, it will automatically assign the strand to the shader of that layer.

When moving a tube strand to another layer, the corresponding shader will be assigned

Changing the shader of a layer

If the default lambert is not for you, you can change the shader type by:

• Selecting the layers

• Go to the Shader Toggle button, and pick a shader type.

Create UV on a strand

To recap, to create UV of a tube strand, you can now toggle geometry selection mode, select the strand geometry, open the Strand Editor, then turn on Auto UV and select Stripe/Grid.

Assign textures

When your tubes have UV auto unwrapped, you can now assign texture to a its shader.

Please note, because a layer is a shader, all the hair tube strands in that layer will be assigned to the same shader. If this is not what you want, you can organize the tubes by moving them to other layers.

If you have textures connected to a shader, and if you must switch the shader to another type, it will strip off all the connections to that shader. You will have to re-connect the textures back.

Switching shader when there are connections will give you a warning saying existing shader connections will be stripped off.