Sasquatch's "baby" version, SasLite, is included with LightWave 7. It's very limited compared to the full Sasquatch tool, but my job for this article was to make a project which used both SasLite and Sasquatch. My object is a Samurai warrior's head and hair.

SasLite has far fewer controls, making it easy for even a LW beginner to create fur and hair in their first projects. But after using it for awhile, you'll notice that one of SasLite's biggest limitations is the ability to create photorealistic hair or fur. But still I think SasLite is a handy tool to learn a little bit of what Sasquatch can do.

Sasquatch has two fiber producing tools; “Fur mode” and “Long Hair mode”. Normally you might choose fur mode for making short hair and long hair mode for longer hair as the names suggest. But, surprisingly, I found it easier to create and manipulate the eyebrows for my character by creating guides to be used in long hair mode

Starting Model and Guide Setup

(pic 1). To begin with, you will need a head model to make a samurai!

(pic 2). We need to make hair guides of 2 point polygons for every area that you want to create hair in Long Hair mode. I made guides for eyebrows, eyelashes and hair (on head) and named the roots of the guide surfaces “Root” and the rest as “Hair”.

(pic 3). Before making long hair, I will be using Modeler's built in curves to create the initial guides and convert them into 2 point polygon chains so Sasquatch can render them. To convert the splines, I used a free plugin, CurveToPolygon, provided by Japanese plugin writer Moly. This tool is very convenient since it automatically sets the surface names for the hair guides. Note that SasLite is limited to only 32 segments of the hair guide, unfortunately.

(pic 4). Next load the head and the hair guide objects into Layout and add texture to the head. You may want to set a bone in your Samurai head in order to move his neck later. In that case parent the hair guides and the eye objects to the bone so that the hair guides will properly to match the head movements.

We're now ready to add some SasLite.

(pic 5) Visit the displacement panel, and add SasLite to hair guide objects.

(pic 6) Double-click on "SasLite" to open the SasLite interface. Sasquatch users might be very surprised to see how simple the interface is.

(pic 7) Select the long hair mode option in the SasLite interface and type “Hair” for the Surface Name to create hair on the guide's surface.

(pic 8) The parameters in (8) are for setting the surface for hair itself. You can define only one color. You can also set Diffuse and Specular like you set for normal objects’ surfaces.

(pic 9) Coarseness allows you to control how thick a fiber is (compared to its length). Frizz allows you to control hair randomly wiggles.Clump Size allows you to control the size of clumps.

(pic 10) Lock Width controls the width of hair around a guide and DensityLlevel, the density of hair for a guide.

(pic 11) Add SasLite to the eyebrow and eyelash guides. You can copy and paste the settings to transfer the same basic settings before tweaking the parameters..

(pic 12) Before rendering, visit the Pixel panel and add SasLite. It is here you can set the Antialiasing Level to 1 or 2 and there are three shadow options that can be used.

(pic 13) Before render your samurai, you will need to set the guide objects Dissolve to 100% so as not to render the guide objects.

How do you like it? Well, as I said, SasLite's output is not very photorealistic. The biggest limitation is that SasLite doesn’t cast hair shadows onto objects, making the roots of hair look especially ugly.

Sasquatch

Let’s move on Sasquatch, the real, full powered tool. I don’t think I am exaggerating that you can do anything with Sasquatch when it comes to fur and hair. When it comes to quality, there's no comparison between SasLite and Saquatch.

If you buy Sasquatch, I recommend you read Stu Aitken’s hair tutorial. I learned a lot from it. Sasquatch has been updated to 1.5 and I especially like the improved rendering times.

Using the same model, let's see what we can do with Sasquatch's more powerful set of tools. When we're done we'll compare the results to SasLite.

(pic 14) Visit the Displacement panel and add Sasquatch to each hair guide objects.

(pic 16) This is “Fur/Fibers tab”, where you can set fundamental hair settings such as Long Hair or Fur mode, fiber coarseness and fiber division. I recommend that you put smaller values into Fiber Divison for test renderings, and make it higher for your final output.

(pic 17) As the name “Long Hair” indicates, this tab contains controls for creating hair from guides. You can see that there are a lot more parameters that SasLite doesn’t have. For example, you can set how many fibers that you will want to create along a guide object with Sasquatch. Sasquatch also provides a nice tool to smooth the path the hair takes along the shape of the guides or you can make your hair helix around the guide without modeling the shape in the guides themselves.

(pic 18) You set the color characteristics in the "Color" tab. It’s very nice to have a Viper-like preview window to tweak the texturing and shading in real-time. SasLite has no preview, and only allows you to set one color but Sasquatch can change the color of the tip or the root of your hair.

Clicking on the small “S” buttons near a control brings up a different panel that offers detailed settings for texturing. SasLite doesn’t have "S" panels.
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(pic 19) I didn’t use the "Mapping" tab for my samurai. But it allows you to texture-map your fur. With Sasquatch 1.5, you can use UV mapping!

(pic 20) With “Shading" tab, you can set the way the hair reacts to light. Unlike SasLite, very detailed settings are possible with Sasquatch, such as controlling highlights. So as you can imagine these shading options really help to make your hair look realistic!

(pic 21) The "Styling" tab has more functions for fur, so I didn’t need to use most of them. I used the Frizz, Kink and Kink frequency to make the hair wavy and slightly random without having to model the guides with these attributes.

(pic 22) The Dynamics tab is for fur so I didn’t use it at all. But it allows your fur to animate automatically. It’s simple to use! Put fur on a ball with Fur mode and animate the ball.. It’s a big shame that SasLite doesn’t have it.

(pic 24) You may need to experiment a little to understand the controls in the“Clumping" tab, which also has controls that are not available with SasLite. Clumping allows groups and bundles of hair instead of isolated strands.

(pic 25) I didn’t need the “Combing tab” since it only applies to fur mode. "Surface combing" is powerful feature that allows the computer do the combing by analyzing your object’s geometry and deriving the natural object contours automatically. SasLite only .has simple X,Y,Z directional controls.

(pic 26) Like SasLite, we need to add the Sasquatch pixel filter before rendering.

(pic 27) Double-click "Sasquatch" in the pixel filter and the Sasquatch interface will appear. In the "Rendering" tab, you can set the level of the antialiasing or enable the real-time preview for texturing or tweaking color. You can also set Sasquatch to render fibers behind transparent surfaces in this panel. SasLite doesn't have this feature.

(pic 28) The “Wind tab” can add real-time wind effects onto the fur fibers so I didn’t use this panel.

(pic 29) You can set the options for LW and fur shadowing with the “Shadowing" tab. You can even cast Sasquatch shadows onto other objects, a feature not available in SasLite..

(pic 30) The “Special" tab has some tools useful to compositors! Sasquatch 1.5 supports Lightwave’s Z-buffer.

(pic 31) You will need to apply the "Sasquatch Shadow" shader to the surfaces that you wish the shadows from Sasquatch fibers to appear. I added Sasquatch Shadow to the surfaces in the head. The shader allows control over the colors and opacity of the shadows.

(pic 32) Let’s render! The model and hairstyle are identical for Saquatch and SasLite, but you can see immediate differences in render quality. And this is without using many of the advanced Sasquatch features.

Since this is mostly a comparison of render quality, the answer is pretty clear. Feature-wise, though, the difference is much bigger than this project shows! SasLite is great to start to play with hair and fur, butI think you’d better to update to Sasquatch if you are using fur or hair in your project, or care about the quality of your hair/fur renders.

Seiji Iseda: Born in Sep. 15, 1971. After graduating from high school in the western part of Japan, he started working at a major electronic companiy as a programmer to manage and develop Internet related projects.Since he found LightWave, he discovered his own artistic mind sleeping in the deep part of his heart. He quit his job and studied LW earnestly, and has been working as a 3D artist ever since.

He is one of most well-known LW Japanese artists. He's published
several books and is a constant contributor of articles to major CG magazines.He is currently a free-lance 3D CG artist, using LW and 3D studio Max.

http://www.3dcg.ne.jp/~iseda

The Japanese version of this tutorial was printed in the Japanese Computer Graphics World magazine in March 2001.