RGB hair growth in Softimage....

How to grow hair by color.

So I hear you ask, "How can I make soft stands grow according to a color?"

Well I answer in a kind - not to overly smart voice -  "Let me show you."

First lets look at color.

Using ICE we will grow hair with different lengths using the RGB value from a texture map. Blue being long hair and the rest being short or so on. Only problem is that some colors are not just blue they are also red like say Magenta(see color wheel below) or yellow(Green and Red) or Ocean(Green and some Blue) and so on. So we will have to compensate for that.

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You can see Magenta is 255 - 0 - 255 (in ICE that would look like 1 - 0 - 1), meaning it is a hundred present blue and a hundred present red. Using an If statement that simply says if something is a hundred present blue then make the hair longer there wont really work well. So we also need to say that, if you happen to have two values that are 255(or 1) then don't use that color to grow the hair longer. If that makes sense :/

Lets look at the ICE setup...

NOTE: If you don't know how to Texture strands using a texture map, never fear. Here is a link to a post I  did  -----> texture map.

Now to get the hair to be either short or long depending on whether or not it is the color you want to be long(Blue), or short(every other color). In the ICE TREE below you will see an If statement that tells the strand length to be either short or long. Then I simply duplicated that tree for red and green values. Using the select case node you can then choose between red, blue, or green if you make a compound. 

I also made a bleed option to include the color values like Magenta and Yellow using two more if statements.

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Blue example:

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Green example:

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Red example:

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Strands with a bleed of 0.4

Strands with a bleed of 0.8

Things I would like to include and improve:

Bleed hair has a fall off growth.

Hair grows in over time .

you can choose only bleed values.

So I will probably be updating this post in the near future.

To be continued.. :)