Create Sea Anemones using Hair and Fur by Luca Broglio, Italy Web: www.lucabroglio.com

This tutorial is dedicated to the use of hair & fur in 3ds max, a modifier that grows hair and fur over any object. Usually hair & fur is used to generate hair: in tufts, sparse, curly, long, short, braids, etc. ... but rarely used for other purposes. This short tutorial will show you how to create and animate sea anemones in a few clicks.

Sea anemones are a group of water dwelling, predatory animals of the order Actiniaria; they are named after the anemone, a terrestrial flower.


Create a seabed modifying a plane as you like. This will be the distribution object.

The second step is to create an anemone strand. To do so you can add a lathe modifier to a spline. Be sure to add enough subdivision to the mesh as you will have to bend it.

Apply the hair & fur modifier to the plane. If needed it's possible to select single face for the distribution. Initially hairs are oriented by the face's normals in an uniform way.



At this point open the panel "tools" of hair & fur, then click in the empty box "Instance node" and pick the anemone object. Instance node allows you to use any mesh instead the default hair object.  Settings like hair segments, passes, etc will be ignored. Certain qualities belong to the mesh used as instance, so if you want more subdivisions you have to edit the original mesh.