I have been having a great time playing with FiberMesh! The following images/information is all generated from what I have been playing with over the past few days and I just wanted to share my experiments. There are probably better ways to do all this stuff, and I have found that I need to study how hair actually functions a lot more
I’ve included some tutorial-esque stuff that I found to work really well (using polygroups on the base object to establish hair groups to create hair parting works great!)
Anyhow hope this may help inspire/open up more experiments to harness this powerful feature
To start off I quickly established polygroups on the base head.
For the curls test the polygroups were almost every other poly along the top of the head (this one took a while to brush out.) Once these groups were established I masked the groups to create the area where I wanted the hair to grow. You may notice that the mask overlaps the polygroups slightly (this will generate another set of polygrouped hair once FiberMesh is activated. You may be able to use this to your advantage, I decided to get rid of it.) To fix this quickly grow your mask (tool:Masking:grow mask) then sharpen it (tool:masking: sharpen mask.) You will notice that the mask falls inside the hair polygroups now.
Once this is finished activate FiberMesh (Tool:FiberMesh:Preview.) Most of the settings need to be configured per hair style. One thing I found to be extremely helpful was setting the Profile to ‘1’ (Tool:FiberMesh:Profile.) Paul Gaboury mentioned this in one of the Zclassroom videos. With Profile set to 1 it unlocks the options for Sides, and Radius. These two options allow for the hair’s thickness to be changed once the FiberMesh is accepted and turned into a new SubTool. (This is a lifesaver if you find that the hair is too thick or too thin after you comb it all out.)
After you hit except you will notice that the new FiberMesh subtool contains all the polygroups that were created on your base object. Next I found that quickly using the GroomHairToss brush will help to quickly tame the hairstyle.
Once you get the style generalized you can then use the polygroups to comb out each hair section exactly where you want it to fall. (Turning on brush masking by polygroups works well at this stage. (Brush:Auto Masking:Mask By Polygroups))
Another thing I found is that the Clip brushes work well for creating evenly cut hair. After using GroomLengthen on the hair use the ClipCurve brush to trim the hair exactly where you want. You will notice that the ends of the hair will contain a little mashing from the ClipCurve. Smoothing out the tips with any smooth brush fixes this.
Other quick things of note that I found to work well (IMO):
The GroomHairBall brush works well for clumping up a section of hair then pulling it out. This works well to create long tapered strands of hair.
The GroomTwist brush works better with a positive twist i when sculpting hair on the left side of the head. A negative twist appears to work better when sculpting hair on the right side.)