Maybe it's just me, but I've been having better luck with strand-based hair in P6 than I did in P5. Not talking about collisions or such (I know they supposedly made improvements there, but I didn't try it yet), I'm just talking about how it looks. Even the stock hair comes out pretty good; more realistic without as much playing in the hair room. Well, that's just one man's opinion. Anyway, I just posted a render of Jessi using the P6 strand-based hair to my gallery if you want to check it out. A word of caution: I don't think I'll be using AO with strand based hair again anytime soon though... the rendertime was ungodly. 3 times longer than the transmapped hair I tried, but I liked the result with strand better.

MAN! That looks good. How long do you think the rendering took? Cheers, Joe

WOW!!! Geez maxxx.... I'd kill for your skills!!!

"How long do you think the rendering took?" Good question. It had to be anywhere from 4 to 6 hours at that size, which I consider pretty long. I know many here have sat through much longer, but for stills, I don't usually bother with anything that would take longer than an hour. I'm so used to having to crank out thousands of frames in animation, anything longer than a few minutes and I'm biting my nails. hehe. I really wish Poser had rendertime displays for it's renders. P6 seems to display some kind of times for previous renders in a dropdown box on the viewport, but I'm not sure if they are "session times" or actual render times. The one I just did says "13hours", but I know it didn't take that long to render.

The hair looks good, although it doesn't seem as "sharp" as the figure itself for whatever reason. An aside: other people have had several complaints against Jessi, but I think I'll be the first I know of to say I really, really think her face is "subpar" to put it politely. Not only do I find it unattractive, but it also looks trickey to morph, especially the nose. Thankfully they've got a more basic head to use in the face room from what I understand. I'm looking forward to seeing what people (including myself someday) do with that. keep up the great work Max, Unzipped

" The hair looks good, although it doesn't seem as "sharp" as the figure itself for whatever reason." Ah, could be the DOF (depth of field) I did in post, attempting to blend her better with the background. Also, there were some issues with "jaggies" on certain parts of the strand based hair that I tried to "smooth" a little. That, more likely than not, is my own fault for not having made some more optimizations in the render dialogue. I wasn't about to re-render through. LOL.

That would probably have something to do with it. Any chance you could just give us an el-cheapo, quickie render with no postwork to see what the "raw" hair looks like? Unzipped

"quickie render with no postwork to see what the "raw" hair looks like?" Sure. I'll do a fast render of the raw hair for you. Give me a few minutes.

Here's a render of that scene with no AO shadows, and all materials set to white, except the hair. I moved the camera up a bit so you can see how the ends look.

And here's the guide hairs before rendering.

Looks very good, maxxxmodelz!

Attached Link: http://www.getjolly.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewforum.php&f=8

Heres a render of Kate with default Poser lights wearing Jessi's hairstyles. I just posted a link to a tutorial as to, how to do this if your interested. :-) Love Jolly

Very cool, getjolly. Good tip.

If anyone's interested, here's a P5 python script to initiate a render to the current viewport or new window (according to the settings) and display the render time. Nothing fancy, as I'm on a Mac and awaiting my P6 box. I have another version which (due to Mac tkInter absence) has hard-coded settings for frame range, destination path and output image type (three letter extension) that will render a range of frames, save them to the destination path and print the individual and total render times. I believe P6 has some python GUI tools which will let Mac users deal with simple python dialogs for data entry, so I'll update the second script and post it when I get my shipment.

Strand hair definately looking much much better. :::og:::

Insanely better, whoever made those hairstyles really knew what they were doing, and it appears the hair materials are much more believable this time around... GAH Hurry up UPS GUY!

Also Jessie's face has a great look, IMO. Lokks hella better than V3 in her default state. (Not that that really means anything at all.) I wonder how the strand based hair takes to cel shading? I've been doing some experiments in P5 today and have gotten some reasonably good results on heavily populated hair like RDNA's free Mod Bob.

Message edited on: 03/31/2005 11:03

Max, the strand based hair does look really good. I expect people will be doing even bigger and better things with it (including yourself). Berserga - we'll just have to be content with our differing opinions on Jessi's face. I find it way too stylized and unrealistic - and not in any good way. Unzipped

W00T! I got my box!