how'd you do it? It looks almos volumetric! I'm impressed...

The only problem with this is that the file sizes will be enourmous and that animations will be almost impossible. What we really need is a proper hair generator in poser (not the hair easter egg) working along the lines of NURBs, whereby a hair is defined not by a hundred polygons but by say 3 control CVs...or by having sectioned off heads on which you can control the length, bend etc growth so that styles can be made up from growing diff. lengths on different sections. For now it seems the best options available are transmapped hair, painted on hair or the cosmo cube . Where this technique may be useful is in uderarm hair, small moustaches and goatees, where there wont be too much hair, therefore not such a monsterous file size.

I can understand your concerns. The hair was created in Max with Shag Hair and converted into geometry. The Hair took about 30 seconds to import into Poser. There were no crashes with this file, and everything worked out great. Of course, I was on a Pentium 500 with 256 Megs of RAM. So, slower machines I just don't know. The file is rather large. 10 Megs to be exact. Remember, this is a work in progress. I still have a lot of work to do. Animaitons are NOT impossible. This head of hear acted like any other prop in a Poser animaiton. Not much slow down. Rendering takes a little longer; but that's really it. One possibility, if you're afraid to use so much hair, is to use a smaller amount of hair and paint hair on the texture map itself (the character's tex. map.) This would be ideal for a fuller-looking head of hair and increase workflow with animaiton. Stills would be no problem. :)

I realized the hair was made using a plugin from another 3d app (i presumed MAX or LW) and I have a similar(slightly faster CPU) system to the one quoted above, but if you think about it , companies like zygote, cacheforce etc. would have used their budgets to produce hair using these plugins along time ago if their was a demand for it. The reality is that if it isnt necessary to use system resources and increase speed then it wont be done, especially if there is an easier less time consuming way of doing it. Realistically the system above wont be used widely commercially. the file size when put into a scene will drastically reduce system performance Not much slow down. >> "Rendering takes a little longer; but that's really it". eg. a drop in performance. people have tried this sort of system before by piping hair along poly lines etc. but it takes up too much timememory. If you do manage to get the file size down to nearer a meg then it will start to be a more feesable option.

Hey. If you don't like this method, don't use it. I think the hair for Poser (and using transmapping) looks awful. I'm willing to take a decrease in performance (which there isn't much for me). Look at Max with Shag Hair. Rendering can slow down to a crawl e.g. a drop in performance; but it's Digimaiton's top selling plugin. Realism is what many of us are going for. Easier and less time consuming isn't always the best way to go. WE ARE ARTISTS. RIGHT?

I am not saying dont try, I just feel that you wont get very far with this method as it has been tried by many before you (using LW plugin,max plugins, Ive even seen it tried with truespace). The reason the plugin you are talking about is used by a lot of people is because it is Max specific, and to be honest it runs well in max and is used for more than just hair although I wish some of the in-house plugins for doing this i have seen were released commercially). Being an artists doesnt mean you have to go the hard way round either.

I respect your input. Thanks for taking the time to tell me what you think. It's nice to get some honost feedback. Later :)

The attempt you posted after this looks better(still a bit CG rather than RW), but i would like to see say a long flowing female hairstyle...now if you can achieve that with this method then i think we would all sacrifice system resources for a little more realism on that. Dont give up trying to find new methods though...=)