Seems I read something about this before in the Forum, but my searches turned up empty. Does "collision detection" work in the Poser 5 Hair Room? I have tried and tried to run a simulation with collision detection checked, but still get hair moving thru the body and head. Am I wasting my time or am I doing something wrong?

This is the EXACT same question I was just about to post! LOL. Actually, I'm having the same problem, and did a search but turned up no answers to it. It simply does not work. No matter what you do, the hair seems to always pass through the figure, and unlike the cloth room, you can't specify any objects for the hair to collide against in the hair room. I'm running on a Pentium 4 2400, with 1 gig ram and over 200 gigs of hard drive space, yet every time I try to enable collisions in the hair room and in the pose room, I get a system lockup when calculating the hair draping. If it does actually calculate, it seems to not work correctly. So I'm assuming it's just useless. Very frustrating. I guess it's back to using Shag Hair calculations in 3ds for me. :-(

As an additional note, One thing I did find during my search of this matter, is that you have to be certain no part of the hair is penetrating any of the areas of your figure BEFORE you run a calculation. However, I've tried doing this, and it still locked up during the draping calculations. Is there any way to be absolutely sure the hair isn't passing through the figure before running a calc? Or is it just a "trial and error" type thing?

The collision algorithm is not as well developed as the one for the cloth room. Additionally, the dynamics for hair aren't meant to be used for the purpose of styling the hair or shaping it to the figure, they are mean to be used in conjunction with the external dynamics of something such as a wind force. The styling tool is for shaping the hair around the head, and the various push/pull and gravity paramaters are for drape. The dynamics calculation presumes the existence of some force (the wind force, specifically) for the purpose of calcuating dynamic movement.

The hair dynamic calculation seems more slow since SR4, I dont yet verified if the problem persists in SR4.1 I use hair room following this method: 1. Create more hair groups keeping separate the ones with hair that could be involved in collision. Using more group its also useful for other reasons: you can do a better distribution of the hair density; its easier styling the hair etc. 2. Do dynamic calculation without collision checked (its fast); 3. Find the hair that intersect body parts, select them and remove intersections with hair styling tools (shorten the strand, bend it etc.); in order to use styling tools, you have to clear the dynamic calculation for the involved groups; 4. Redo dynamic calculation with collision checked for the groups that can collide (not for other group). I hope I was clear: Im Italian and my English isnt very well

Good solution, Marco, but it seems far to laborious a task to do if you're using it for animation (multiple frames). I hope the dynamic hair is something they improve on in version 6, because right now it's fairly useless to me. What good is the wind dynamic if strands can still intersect the figure, or if it takes longer to calculate than it does to render? I mean, for stills this is ok, because you can postwork the imperfections out... but for animation, it sucks. :-(

I have been complaining about this since Poser 5 was released and no one has answered my questions about it. I finally gave up and figured I was doing something wrong and that's why it wasn't working. No, I don't have a fix, just wanted to say thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one who thinks the hair should NOT go through the head and body. That's like saying, here have a glass of milk, oh, sorry. There was a hole in the glass and it's all gone. Marque

"That's like saying, here have a glass of milk, oh, sorry. There was a hole in the glass and it's all gone." Exactly. There's no point to the dynamic hair if you can't use it in animation effectively. More than 90% of the time, you will not be using a windforce anyway. The dynamics should be optimized for gravity and character movement with a focus on collision detection where you can just simply define the character or parts of the character as a "deflector". I think Curious Labs sometimes forgets to focus on people who ANIMATE, and cater mostly to those who do only still images. Again, frustrating and disappointing. I'll give them credit for their cloth room and material room though, they did an excellent job there. But CL, if you are listening... more improvements for us animators in the future PLEASE!

I am going to the store today to check on an article I was looking at yesterday that deals with hair in Poser 5, so I will get it and see if it helps. Don't know about collision detection, didn't get a chance to read it through yesterday, but I will let you know what it says about the hair room. Can't remember the name of the mag, have to go see the covers...lol Don't get old...heh Marque

Definitely let me know what you find out, Marque. Send me an IM if this thread gets burried. I'm pretty sure it's a lost cause, but maybe there's something we aren't thinking of that would correct this. As ynsaen pointed out, the dynamic hair algorhythm isn't currently meant for what we want to do with it, but you never know.

Ok it's in Digital Creative Arts Issue 8 -Load your hair -Go to the hair room and adjust dynamics, spring damping is like spraying the hair with a virtual conditioner -at frame 1 select the neck to tilt the head down and advance to the end of the range -move the head again and scrub through the timeline to watch the head move to the new position -once you set the keyframes go to the menu and choose Animation > Recalculate > All Hair -add your wind -render the hair -go to animation > movie output settings and do a test render -go to animation > make movie When you choose all hair don't get impatient as it goes through and recalculates each group. I did it and it actually worked out pretty well. Marque