I am hoping to be able to grow hair on animal models. I model the animals in Carrara as 1 mesh object, but the hair must be placed in only a few places on the model. An example is a beaver. There is no hair on the tail. How easy is Anything Grows to use? Can I manage to place the hair wherever on the model or just all over. It seems to create an entire new model. Must it be textured then place the hair, and retexture? Can someone with some experience with Anything Grows please answer these questions? I'm excited to try it with Carrara 3. One more question, with a hairy beaver (excuse the obvious sexual implications of this example), how much ram and processor size would I need to animate it? It's not a greatly detailed beaver but the hairs could be in the 1,000's +. Thanks

Never Give Up!

Anything Grows will allow you to grow things from named vertex areas in the mesh. It's easy to do. AGrows handles strands in the thousands easily - depending on your system and the parameters you dial in. If you're trying to create a very thick pelt, AGrows may not be a good fit - especially if animation starts coming into play. It will demand some time and a powerful processor. I use AGrows for many things but might try to acheive this effect with texture maps first. For some situations like this I have two models: one with AGrow for close-ups and one with only texture maps for longer shots. Mark

You can also link the length of the hair to your texture map, if I remember correctly (need to spend more time with AGr)