Simulations 3: Fur and Hair - Essential LightWave 3D [8] - page 510

Chapter 20

Simulations 3:
Fur and Hair

In this chapter, we'll take a detailed look at
the tools needed to simulate hair and fur
through the use of LightWave's SasLite
plug-in. SasLite is the younger brother to
Sasquatch, a comprehensive hair and fur
simulator developed by Worley Labs. The
focus of this chapter will be on the capabili-
ties of SasLite, but we will also examine the
differences between it and the full version
of this amazing utility.

Note
Robin Wood is the artist who wrote the doc-
umentation on SasLite for the LightWave [8]
manual. She is an expert on SasLite and has
been kind enough to share her knowledge
with us by authoring this chapter.

An Introduction to SasLite

SasLite is a wonderful tool that allows you
to add fur and hair to your objects. It works
as both a displacement plug-in and a pixel
filter. As such, you need to enable it in two
different places in LightWave in order to
see the effect.
Let's jump right in and see how it works.

you like, and leave everything else at
the default values. (See Figure 20-2.)

Note

I won't be going into great detail about
what each of the SasLite options does,
because I've already covered that in the
LightWave 8 documentation. If you don't yet
have LightWave 8, you can find that portion
of the documentation on the companion CD
in the Sas Settings folder.

1. Make a 1 meter sphere in Modeler, and

bring it into Layout (or simply load
objects\Chapter20\1MeterBall.lwo
from the CD).

4. Tap < Ctrl >+< F8 > (or go to Win-

dow | Image Processing… ) and
open the Processing tab of the Effects
window. You'll see places to add two
kinds of filters to your rendered image:
pixel filters and image filters. Since
SasLite is a pixel filter, that's the one
you want. Click on Add Pixel Filter
and choose SasLite from the list. (See
Figure 20-3.)

2. Open the Object Properties panel by

tapping < p >, and click on the Deform
tab, where the displacement plug-ins
are stored. Click on Add Displace-
ment , and choose SasLite from the
list. (See Figure 20-1.)

3. Double-click on SasLite to open the

Sasquatch Lite options panel. For now,
just change Fiber Color to something