...otherwise your head might look like this! In my ongoing quest for finding the ultimate render settings, the current stop is hair room. I'm not good at styling hair, but the renders look better than the default settings IMO.

This is one of the hair styles that came with P5.

Furette - I posted this one in an earlier thread already.

And the mandatory furball. Would there be any interest in a "how to render hair"-tutorial? Or am I wasting my time? There are a number of hair styling tutorials already (which I admit I should work through myself), but I saw that most of them render the hair with FireFly's defaults which don't look as good as my settings IMHO.

These definitely look better than the results I've got in the past. I'd be interested!

I would... be interested. I Love all your tips and tricks, thanks for sharing them.

I'd definitely be interested. Thanks!

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Yes please !! I find often that hair that is created in the hair room ends up looking very wispy and gossamer-like. So any workarounds for those sorts of problems would be good ...

yes please. Anything that makes the hair room less of a mystery to me would be great :)

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A tutorial would be fantastic. Please do!

OK...so first of all, I have collected a list of hair styling tutorials on my web page that are worth checking out.

Then, a couple of tips on how to render hair:

• Use FireFly. Don't use the Poser 4 renderer, it renders hair too thick.
• Work on your lighting. A good three point lighting will look a lot better than Poser's default light set.
• Turn shadows on for at least one light. I prefer mapped shadows, they are softer. If it becomes too dark, turn down the shadow intensity. You may also try turning off the "cast shadows" option for the hair, that's what I did for the fur ball. This will look great with a backlight.
• Use lots of hair strands and reduce the number of vertices. The default of 20 is a lot, I usually use between 7 and 14. Furette's fur has only 4 vertices per hair, but 100,000 (!) hair strands.
• In the production render settings, set a high number of pixel samples and a gauss or sinc filter of 2 pixels size. You may need to reduce the bucket size.
• To get the best look for the final render, enable depth of field. Takes very long to render, but I used it in the first three images. If you're good in Photoshop, you could try to make DOF in there.
• This one's not related to rendering but is a good styling tip: Did you know that you can use magnets on dynamic hair? You do now.

Experiment and enjoy!
-Stefan

(BTW, the ladies in the first two pictures are both face room'd variations of Judy. Including their textures.)