hair and fur

[B.Y.O.B.]

I had to fight some very annoying self-inflicted bugs, but now the basic hair conversion works in all my testscenes, even with some pretty pathological cases (e.g. all hairs with length zero).

Bonus: weird stuff happens if you set worldscale to 0.001 because my epsilon was a bit too big in this case - but at least all point arrays still have the correct length
I now made the epsilon smaller so even this crazy worldscale works now.

Todo: color export.

[lacilaci]

So would you say, we can expect some improvements in the next alpha? or is this some ongoing work that will take some more time?

[B.Y.O.B.]

I think I can finish it in the next days.

[B.Y.O.B.]

What is really annoying is that I currently have to call a Blender function through Python for each hair strand.

For example, the conversion of a hair system with 200,000 individual hairs has these timings:
- Calling Blender's co_hair function 200,000 times to fill a numpy array with coordinates: 5.342 s
- Checking the points for invalid ones, calculating the number of valid segments etc. (this code was pure Python before and is now C++): 0.083 s
- Tessellating the hair with "triangle ribbon" mode: 1.05 s

I will have to check again if I can somehow do the first step in C++ as well, but last time I looked it wasn't feasible.

(by the way the same hair system takes 20.951 s to export with the old code)

[Sharlybg]

I will have to check again if I can somehow do the first step in C++ as well, but last time I looked it wasn't feasible.
(by the way the same hair system takes 20.951 s to export with the old code)

That is a huge improvement anyway

[B.Y.O.B.]

I will have to check again if I can somehow do the first step in C++ as well, but last time I looked it wasn't feasible.

As I thought, I found no way to speed this step up.
I even tried calling the co_hair function from C++ (though boost::python), but that was even slower.

So, I'll write the color export and then it should be done.

[B.Y.O.B.]

Had to cope with non-existent documentation again.
But now the mode "UV image -> vertex colors" works again for hair.
I think I will add a new mode that only copies UV information to the hairs, without creating vertex colors, and try to make the UI less confusing.

[B.Y.O.B.]

Emitter vertex colors -> hair vertex colors support is done:

[lacilaci]

so i guess alpha v4?

[Sharlybg]

Awesome results ! you're inspiring