Attached Link: http://www.zygote.com

My new items - a set of two hair items and a beret are up at Zygote. I fitted them to both Vickiw and the Posette, to make them easy to apply. All items are parented props. I've used a new system I've developed, not layers but a collection of tubes, actually tubes inside tubes. The trans maps are sort of weird, as the tubes were all mapped as columns before they were bent to make the hair. The advantage is the maps are small (1024 x 1024 is plenty), as all the tubes uses different sections of the same map.

I got this this just 2 nights ago its a terrific buy, I was gonna buy the gel style and didnt and now Im so glad I waited, its so much better, a much better buy and works perfect thanks Jim I was very pleased with my purchase.

I bought your items at Zygote, and they are great! Would you be willing to expound a bit further on your tube technique for making hair for those of us with access to other 3D modelling applications, like writing a tutorial? Thanks!

Wow! Those look great Jim. Is there any post work on the image or do the hair props really look that good in a vanilla render?

Jim I just bought these tonight and they double rock :o) i've been wanting a bob style since early p3 days.....if you do requests Jim I'd love a morph to give her a straight fringe :o)........Steve

FINALLY! Some really great babe hairstyles to go with Vicky! Wow! I'm heading right over now with credit card to get these. Plus a beret I can use with my Mike-John Wayne character and my Vicky-Monica Lewinsky character!

I downloaded these hair props this morning and will install them tonight. I'm glad to see they look so good! Thanks for posting them. BTW...I've seen Victoria with LONG blonde hair and have wondered where it came from. Could it have been the posable curly hair for P4? And where are the texture and transparency maps for that hair prop, if they exist? And if they don't exist, why hasn't somebody made them...?

Jim, this bob is great... could you make a morph for it pinned back? I am looking for casual and work styles but all I find are "glamour" hairs. This bob is great, but most woman I work with tuck behind the ear(s) or use bobby pins or those bands that go across from ear to ear, I don't know the word for them... could you do it? Anyhow, I'm off to buy this bob!

The direct link is here (address is too long for URL field): http://store.zygote.com/cgi-bin/miva?Merchant2/merchant.mv+Screen=PROD&Store_Code=ZP1&Product_Code=ps_ac066b&Category_Code=new Jim: What are these 'tubes' I keep hearing about? Is this a feature in 3DStudioMAX I can't simulate in other 3D editing programs, or are they just mapped and bent rectangular tubes? Two minutes before I saw your post I was thinking about color-layered hairstyles (not bleachblondes with dark roots, but bleachblondes with darker hair underneath). This could be done with multiple hair objects (darker on skull, lighter on top of darker layer), right? For closeup headshots, it would look more realistic than just painting a translucent brown on all the locks... And while I'm picking on details, I looked at Vicky's Flip Hairstyle's texmap and noticed that unlike most of ours, hers appeared to be generated in a draw-type program (to neatly conform to curls) and not the Kozaburo brush method. Is this also part of the Tubes thing as far as you know?

Good work Jim, as ever :)

fantastic

Jim, those look just great! I'm off to buy them now!

Just a quick and dirty job with the new hair.no postw. The girl is p4nw with the fara-texture

Just.... WOW! Awesome Jim !!!!!

......I just ordered.......Jim, all of your stuff is of the highest quality and I have all of your lingerie stuff which is outstanding!!!! Krel

Got the files - Superb quality ;-)

Thanks guys & gals! I've been pondering ways to make better hair for a long time now, Allie's transmapped hair was a revelation to me, I've been trying ever since to come up with a system that worked at least as good and had smaller files (object and maps) so it would render faster. Your going to need something like 3D Max to bulid hair like this, I start out with a hollow cylinder 6 sided or so, put another cylinder inside it, then map it, then use Max's free form deformatin to work with the paired cylinder as a unit. With this tool you basicly get a "box" around the cylinder, and you can have as many (or as few) handles as you need to bend it properly. Then the real work starts - I bend the cylinder around the head, starting at the back, and then clone it, modify the next clone to fit, clone the clone and so on, working tward the front. All the time you have to be working tward the "look" you want, I can't stand the ever-populat center parted look, so building just half and mirroring is not an option for me, most people don't have their topknot in the middle! I think there are something like 40-50 pairs of tubes in each hair, plus the bobbed hair has some solid "wild" hairs. Final step is to moddify the mapping so the tubes are a little more random. Feeling ultra-clever I managed to make both hairs use the same maps, so each gets to use all 4 colors, I really like the auburn, both Pervers & Polartech's renders above really look great! The trans mapps have to have hair lines that thin out near the ends, so the ends look nice and fine. I'll see about making some more morphs as requested. Oh yes - no retouch in my render, that wouldn't be fair, would it!

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/pacificd7/Hollywood.JPG

The hair styles are really great and I had to try them on my favorite Vicky model, Darth Logice's Marilyn Monroe. But two problems for me- 1. I can't get the hair to scale properly- it does some scaling in x, or y, etc. but I cannot just scale it bigger- is this something to do with Vicky's head geometry- and should the hair be scaled before attaching it to her head? 2. I see a lot of pattern noise in the hair when I render it. I have found that doing a 2048 x 1024 pixel render, and reducing it down takes care of much of it. I also use Photoshop's motion blur- because I can attack the noise pattern at a specific angle, unlike just a regular blur. But- is there a possible pattern rotation that might also minimize this? (It seems almost like a moire effect).

Opps, wrong hair.... I don't have any problems scaling it, you will have to reposition it in Y if you scale it vertically, at least on the Vickie model. It is a moire effect, there is a lot of detail there, and Poser's anti-aliasing could be improved on. Best bet is do as you found out, render it larger and scale it down. Should only be a problem with close-ups.

I am still having problems with the scaling once it is attached, but if I scale it before that it seems to be o.k. I would guess there is probably no problems on P4 heads. How did you get the nice light blonde hair- lightening it in Photoshop? (Also, how about a nice "page boy" hairstyle. They look fantastic on Asian and Scandinavian babes) Hint Hint.

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/poservue/Hollywood2.JPG

O.k., I realized that I could just switch the hair color to get the blonde look. And I found that by sizing the hair before attaching it to Vicky, that that was the trick too. However, after rendering the main high-rez render, I went ahead and told the hair to conform to Vicky-Marilyn's head, and saw it "jerk" to a slightly new scale- creating the crimp look and also slightly reducing the scale again. I am certain that there is something weird about Vicky's head geometry...

Jim: While I've got you, what's the point of putting a mapped hexagonal tube inside another one? Are both mapped to achieve textural depth, or is the outside one transparent to create some spacing between tubes?

Fox-Mulder- The hair is a parented prop, you shouldn't have to conform it, actually, you shouldn't even be able to conform it, for that matter you shouldn't be able to open it without a figure already there. I don't know what is going on with your copy of Poser! duanemoody- The idea of the inside tube is to give it body, like they say in the shampoo ads! Both tubes are trasmapped from end to end, the hair strands get thinner near the ends.

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/pacificd7/Wet.JPG

Jim I'm using Version 4.0.3 of Poser (which I've upgraded since version 2. But I have not really used Poser much until Vicky came along). Speaking of shampoo- what would Marilyn look like stepping out of the shower? Like this? I discovered the "wet-hair" look by playing around with the transparency map- trying to make the Moire go away for close up shots. Your earlier post about "Poser's anti-aliasing leaving something to be desired" made me check it in rendering options- and it made almost all of the Moire effect go away. I had not normally used it because it makes renders longer and I usually do this in Photoshop. However, it seems to be really important for the initial render in Poser when using this type of transmapped hair. I got the "wet-hair" by shortening the transmap by two-thirds. It causes the hair to clump together like wet hair while still leaving the end strands looking realistic.