Put really simply, Dynamic Hair looks really really good, but adds ages to your rendering time. So if I'm using something like "Kozaburo's Messy Hair" the image will render in minutes. If I'm using "Dynamic Hair" the image will render in 40 minutes to an hour. Is there a way to "Dumb Down" Dynamic Hair to reduce the render time? Thanks, Chloe

For free flying hair, experimentation. If it is bound in any way, you might want to get one of Harvey Mann's hair props and examine it closely. He only uses the dynamic hair for things like ponytails and bangs, and free flying tendrils about the ears. The rest of the hair is actually transmapped (and since it is hair that is pulled tight due to -being- bound, it works just fine). It saves some time...and frees up resources to make the stuff that actually does move thicker and more lifelike.

40 minutes? Wow, I've never had it take that long. Keep the number of verts per hair as low as you can (this is the number of vertices for each strand of hair). Also keep the number of hairs as low as you can. I find it's useful to have separate hair groups around the edges of the scalp. I have a thin band across the forehead, another at the nape of the neck and one along each side. Those areas need extra density to look good, but as long as you have those well covered you can bring the number of hairs in the middle of the scalp right down which speeds up renders.

Having hacked Dynamic hair to death, I can say that Ajax is right, and also you'll want to hunt up a little posting from me in the poser technical forum here and int he Poser 5 forums at RDNA and Poser Pros -- a great deal of that slowdown in render time is due to the dynamics being stored. The P5 hair fix will tell you how to fix that, and believe me -- you'll see some serious changes in your hair rendering time. (for the better, I might add)

If you divide your hair in several groups, you can also hide the parts that aren't visible - if you see the person from the side, hide the hair on other side.

The rendering time for Dynamic hair is definately down to 1: Number of verts 2: Dynamic *.dyn files Here's a trick : Open the HR2 file in Wordpad and delete all lines refering to *.dyn. I do this to all my P5 hair before putting it up for sale.

lol... I knew someone would remember my instructions...

So what's the trick to getting the dynamics to work? Either P5 locks up, or the hair passes through the head. I AM using V3, and at over 140,000 polys, I guess my expectations are a bit high. At least it doesn't turn into a Brillo pad anymore.

Well, that's the rub. The first thing I dove into with P5 to any depth was the face room, then material room, then it was hair, and then cloth. Of all of them the weakest is really the hair, and that's becuase the algorithms aren't really the best they could be. Which isn't a knock -- not by a long shot. Those things are INCREDIBLY hard to get right. Some folks spend lifetimes working on single ones. 1 - Don't expect perfection. I piddled around with the early maya hair stuff, and it wasn't much better (IMNSHO, it was actually worse. Now that isn't the case, but that was then). If you are trying to get Scully from Monster's Inc in the hair room, you're on the wrong platform. Going for a nice style, though, you can do it. 2 - Work in chunks with the hair. All by itself, it's a gigantic file. Takes up a lot of your system's power to deal with. 3 - Use the dynamics ONLY in animations, and then as sparingly as possible. Otherwise style it. 4 - Learn to use the style tools -- this is, more than anything else, the real secret to using the hair room. Everyone tends to think backwards with the hair room: dynamic stuff first, style second. Sorta like "grow it, let dynamics drape it around the head for me, and then style it from there". That's the biggest error. It workflow is actually Grow it, style it, and then use the dynamics in animations with the prinicpal feature that the hair is designed to be used with: the wind force. The "dynamic" aspect of the hair was never supposed to be used to style the hair, only to alter the styled hair's appearance under some form of dynamic modifier. (and I never get into the bitch sessions about dynamic hair because telling someone they're thinking wrong when they are upset is akin to dousing yourself with gasoline while barbequing...) 5 - go to a salon and talk to a stylist about how they cut hair. Heck -- most folks see one at least once every couple months. And us girls usually more often than that. So ask about how hair is styled. The info is VERY applicable to working in Poser's hair room. The rest of the "tricks", well, lol I gotta save SOMETHING for the book!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1826507

And it's none too bad :)

Free is always good! I'll have to try it again. After installing SR4 I had hoped that the collision issues were resolved. Yeah, it draped, but the hairs passed through her face! First it frizzed... ...then it locked up... ...now it doesn't collide? I must be doing something wrong after so many updates.

Do not drape the hair. Style the hair. If you are doing stills, do not use the dynamic motion, only use the style tools. Dynamics are only for animations. There is a problem still present after the last patch that I first noticed in SR2: You can only calculate drape one or two times before it sorta get's lost and locks into a loop. Fixing collisions is a priority with P6.

Wow, that's the total opposite of what I do, ynsaen. I drape and never style. I find the hair room difficult and slow to use but I haven't had any lock ups at all, depite the fact that I calculate dynamics all over the place. It's a mystery what causes these problems. It seems to be so different for each person.

But I only need "dynamic" hair for animations, otherwise transmapped is fine. I really like the way it flows with movement, I just wish I could have the collisions. I have played with hair in the cloth room using transmapped flaps, that isn't too bad. I just don't like making the transmaps. If it weren't for the material room, I'd cry.

"Wow, that's the total opposite of what I do, ynsaen. I drape and never style. I find the hair room difficult and slow to use " I'm going to explain something that I've picked up about the hair room in my endeavors, and hope that it translates well for iamonk (who shouldn't cry), and sorta let's Ajax (an anyone else that peeks in) why I describe using the hair room in the above manner. I think that Ajax's approach is the usual one -- ie, the one that folks will do more or less "out of habit" because that's what they expected the hair room to be. As a result, they get frustrated with the hair room, and they go very slow in it, and they have a pretty unsatisfied view of the hair room. The key point, though, is the "expectation". Thanks to the wonderfully perceptive manual that comes with it, and the way that the community originally anticipated the hair to be, the hair room is misunderstood. The drape and dynamic motions of the hair were intended specifically to be used in conjunction with the windforce tool. If the windforce tool is not used, these functions are actually sorta working against the hair room. I came to this conclusion from esssentially sitting down and looking at the way that Poser handled the hair during my investigations into the dynamic hair file format. I do not believe that the hair room was properly documented in it's usage, and the functions and flow of the room and the way the functions are described in the manual sorta back this up. THe dynamic elements are always called into play with a description of using the wind force in the manual, while none of the rest of it is. Furthermore, in my absolutely unscientific and likely unethical experiments on unsuspecting hairs, I noted that the collsions actually worked better when the wind force was employed. This led me to play with the windforce a bit, and that little component has some rather interesting capabilities itself, but is even less well documented than the hair room. I believe, based on the overall performance improvements in the program and in the hair in general, and in the layout and design of the tools, that that first reaction is wrong -- essentially, I'm saying that curious labs totally missed what the community really wanted, but instead gave us a different tool. If, for example, I wanted to have my character's hair blowing off to the side with a few wispy tendrils caressing her cheek as she mourned for her love, dead in her arms, I would use the style tools to make it look like that first. Then I would set up the dynamics and include the wind force -- essentially to "tweak" the effect and give it that little "breath" (sorry) of fresh air (not sorry). I would NOT, however, use the dynamics to make the hair fall down around her head -- that's not what it appears to me they were designed for, and the basis of that assessment is how poorly they do that when they do it so much better the other way. The other indicator of this was the hairs that are currently in place in P5. Their dynamic settings are not active. In other words, the hair that comes with P5 (which was developed to showcase that very hair) isn't animated. It's styled. So it's basically not an "easy" thing to do (you have to learn how to use the style tools, which are somewhat clumsy, and you have to group your hair properly). The dynamics are not intended to be used to shape the hair, they are intended to affect the hair after it has been shaped. I can't speak to lock ups -- those have, more often than not, proven to be system dependent issues -- but I can speak to the frustration of using the hair room in the way that seems to be the "natural" and intuitive way. I think that part of this confusion stems greatly from the fact that the cloth room actually works the OTHER way -- for cloth, dynamics ARE used to shape it as well as modify it afterwards. But the cloth room is a differnet creature altogether. I hope this makes sense. ynsaen :)

I guess the problem I see with that approach is that if you're doing an animation where that windswept girl turns around, or bends over or something, you don't want it to look like her hairdresser put three coats of industrial strength laquer on her hair to keep it in a permanent wind-swept-to-the-left position. For me, "dynamic hair" really implies that the hair has to react realistically as the girl moves. Otherwise it should just be called "hair" or "strand based hair". I don't want to have to style the hair for every picture. I want to be able to set up a hairstyle that will work on the same girl in several different renders where she's standing up, bending over or doing a handstand - and I want the hair to be recognisably the same hair. That means I have to have working dynamics. If you style the hair to hang down, then when you turn your person upside down, the hair points straight up into the sky. That's not what "dynamic" is supposed to mean. When I say I find the hair room slow to use, I mean in terms of the interface design, not in terms of the speed of dynamics calculations or rendering. The face that I can't copy all of the settings from one hair group and paste them to other hair groups frustrates me no end for example. I don't get the lockups or super slow rendering other people report. In fact, I find that dynamic hair renders not much slower than transmapped. I agree that the hair provided with P5 is all built like solid rock so that it hardly reacts to movement at all, but I make a different guess at why that happened. CL asked several well know independent content providers to make that stuff. I think the hair is the way it is basically becuase those people didn't have much time to really get to know the program first, were operating without much guidance on how they should build the hair and are mostly people that work with still images and are used to making rock solid transmapped hair - so their heads just weren't in the right space for tackling something dynamic. I find that if I work at it hard enough, I can get the sort of dynamics I want out of the hair room. Collisions even work for me to the point of stopping the hair going through the head to a reasonable extent, though I can't get it to collide properly with other objects, such as chairs, tables or the floor.

"For me, "dynamic hair" really implies that the hair has to react realistically as the girl moves. Otherwise it should just be called "hair" or "strand based hair". " Absolutely agreed. In fact, what I'm saying is that it is only strand based hair of that sort, not the "dynamic" sort that the cloth room is. Even the sales literature reflects this -- but since when have any of us bothered with that? lol Dynamic hair is described on my box in exactly this way: "Grow strand-based hair on figures and props in your Poser 5 scene using the new Hair Room! Growth controls allow you to control aspects such as length and thickness. Styling controls allow you to shape your hair -- make it thick or thin, straight or curly. Apply dynamics such as gravity to your hair to create dynamic effcts during animation." Given that the people involved in that at the time were rather technically minded, I'm willing to bet that's a pretty direct take from the programming guide. Now, if I'm appearing to say that doing it another way is wrong, I apologize. I think it is, but I'm not trying to make anyone uncomfortable. I also happen to believe that you can do it the other way -- but it'll take ya a lot longer to use...

Yep, it definitely takes a lot longer. It's a question of what you want though. If you're trying for animation, you really have to take the dynamic approach. Certainly for stills, you can just go with the styling and it'll be a whole lot faster.

oh -- related note: The styling tools are frame specific. That is, you can change the style from frame to frame. I'm not usre it's accessible in the spline tools, though -- haven't checked there and it just now occurred to me. Must look into that.