3. Hair And Cloth

The hair refinements are pretty cool! In old versions of Max, fur and hair used to be plugin only. V9 has created a "virtual barbershop" for characters "in program." You can virtually "comb" a character’s hair as it updates in the viewport; the interactive response is quite peppy. I’ve taken the liberty of giving a badly-mapped parametric head a classic 1980s hair band’s "super-mullet" (professional up-front and 100% party in the back).

This took no time at all; approximately five minutes later I was able to grow hair on a default parametric mesh by simply choosing the faces and then "roughly" combing the style.

Oh Fabio, who knew styling your mane could be this easy!

Cloth has gone through a major revamp as well. Users can now tailor clothing by using an edit mesh at the vertex level without having to modify the initial splines used to create the clothes. The parameter "cling" has also been added to the surface engine. This allows cloth to have surface friction/stickiness as used when simulating wetness or static.