"You want to feel it, I can tell."

The demon stroked his beard with his fingers, eyeing you as you stare deeply into the beautiful and individually-rendered hairs.

"Don't be shy!"

You reach upward as the demon bends far down to get his head just above yours. As you stroke his beard you can feel each and every hair being physically present and not merely implied via a texture plastered on a solid mass. You have never enjoyed a demon's facial hair more than in this moment.


I have decided to dip my toes into hair simulation, and Hellfarch turned out to be the perfect test bed to figure it out! Maya's XGen hair simulation is clunky and pretty unstable, not to mention that it creates a lot of external files that feel like annoying clutter. However, Maya now has a version of it called the Interactive Groom Editor, which you'd think would be just a part of the regular XGen system but it turns out it is its own separate set of features. It lets you generate and work with hair without creating tons of exterior files and is considerably more stable from XGen proper, though it can still be pretty crashy if you aren't careful.

Making Hellfarch's whiskers was pretty easy and straightforward, but his beard is surprisingly difficult to wrangle into shape. Not only is it difficult to get all of the hairs to squeeze into the ring (which I wasn't fully able to do, hence why you can see a bunch of stragglers everywhere), but it also turns out that the plump, reverse teardrop shape of his beard is pretty difficult to get with actual hair, since if it goes too wide then there physically aren't enough hairs to fill in the space inside of the silhouette it makes. And while I have figured out how to deform the hair guides so that it is roughly just as poseable as the original geometry-based facial hair, the beard does not follow along very nicely and so it clips through and outside of the ring very often.

Despite the difficulty with setting it up, hopefully I'll learn how to work with hair simulation better in the future, as I think it can look really nice!