In this tutorial we will create some hair styles with Maya fur plug-in. Im assuming that you have a basic knowledge in Maya and its core concepts and procedures, which will help to keep this tutorial as short as possible. A video version of this tutorial can be found at https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/tutorials/paint-fx/c/making-hair-styles-with-maya-fur-video

First well create a new UV set which will be linked to the fur description node later.

1.    Select the head and go the side view. And press F11 to go the face selection mode and select the faces which make up the scalp area. You can start with a basic selection and also try using the paint selection tool (edit > paint selection tool).

 

 

2.    After the faces have been selected we need to create a UV projection node.
On the Create UVs menu select Cylindrical Mapping. This will create a new mapping node.

 

3.    Now locate the polyCylProj1 node and set the rotate x to -90. This will rotate the projection node so it should look like this.

 

4.    Now we will save this set of UVs to a new UV set. Select > convert selection > to faces will convert the selection to UVs.

5.    Open window > UV texture editor to view the UVs. You can use the UV texture editor to scale or move the UVs if needed.

6.    Select a UV from the UV texture editor that belongs to the UV set we want to save. Select, select shell from the select menu. This will select all the UVs that belong to the UV shell.

7.    Select polygons> copy UVs to UV set > copy in to new UV set >  to open the copy in to new UV set options box. Enter fur_hair as the new UVset name. Click, apply and close.

Now we are ready to add the fur description node.

8.    Press F8 to return to object mode. Select the head and select, fur > attach fur description > new. This will attach a new fur description node to the head mesh.

9.    We need to edit the fur description nodes attributes to the desired values to make the hair style.

10.    You can start with a preset from the fur description node to make hair styles.  It is the easiest way to start. However I have added some methods of creating different hair styles.