Jessi Is Too Blonde
An Animation.

Hair. Can't make a movie without it.
Can't wrestle it to the ground.

In the movie Final Fantasy, the 50,000
strand hair for Aki Ross was said to
consume 60% of the entire movie's render
budget. The filmmaker's seriously considered
having the bad guys cut her hair short
when she was captured half way thru...and good riddance.

In Poser 6, strand hair has reached an interesting level
of power in this great little program. The hair 'props'
included are not the scraggly, crinky, thin thin thin
efforts we have seen before. Nope. This is a serious implementation.

This is a test animation of Jessi with strand hair gone wild.
Women WILL flip their hair, you know.

Link: Right-click here and download.
8.2 MB Quicktime.

I decided to see if there are possibilities to shoot strand
hair close in, to see if the effect works.

My verdict: This specific animation 'does not work' in the
sense that I would never put it in a film. The hair flows
and falls, but it still does not convey natural movement
to me. But...the potential is evident. I would need to learn
more about the gravity, springiness, elasticitcy and air damp
controls. Frankly, I could spend weeks with those controls just
taking this raw feature and seeing if it could be tamed in a close
up. (I think it is already effective in a long shot)

Also, the materials effecting the appearance.....
I think most strand hair (including what I saw in the
commercial movie 'The Incredibles') has too much sheen.
For this animation I played around with the reflection
node, but there are many more places one could attack
the sheen. It's not a matter of dialing back the lights..
if you do so, you cut down the sheen but the model's face
goes dark. And in my mind "Jessi is too blonde" already.
I do NOT like the look of the default texture with blonde
hair. The coloring is NOT right and the contrast too stark
and dissonant.

I deployed face_off's "Realism" shader suite both to
supply depth and texture to the skin, and also to lighten
the texture's tone. I could also have opened the texture
in my graphic software to adjust the color.

Stats:
Poser 6
Content SR1
Jessi (not hi-res jessi)
Morphs: none. This is only the default visage.
Conforming dress
JessiShortBlonde strand hair
Frame size: 405x405
Frame rate: 30fps
Engine: Firefly
3 Lights: main , filler, backlight' shadow cast
on main only, no raytrace, AO or IBL
Render: hair dynamics (four required) ran REALLY FAST,
like in 15 seconds each. I was amazed.
Render settings:
smooth polygons
use displacement maps
minshading rate .2
pixel samples 10
max texture size 512
bucket 32

Render rig: AMD Athlon 3500+, 4GigRam, RaptorArrayRaid-0
Render time for 150 frames: 12 hours, 40 minutes

::::: Opera :::::

Nice, but I agree, not really feature movie quality yet. But way better than many other programs are capable of.

The movement looks "almost there." Maybe more stiffness from the roots to half-way from the end might do the trick.

I was thinking more gravity/weight, also, to hold it down a little. I'll try the stiffness idea also.

Try increasing root stiffness falloff, as was suggested. Also, much less spring and possibly even less gravity.

Dynamic hair movement is a tricky beast, but you can definitely get the movement looking VERY real (with lots of fussing around in the parameters).

Message edited on: 04/18/2005 23:54

That's really cool, Opera! I don't have P6(yet) and P5 dynamic hair is too fake looking to me for all the work that has to go into animating it. I'm curious, what were the camera focal settings? Jessie's face looked kinda distorted - or maybe it's just me.

focal: I shoot at 125 for medium closeups such as this. Yes, might be distortion, or......you might be quite accustomed to seeing her shot close up at 35 (the default) and in my mind that is the distortion. ::::: Opera :::::

Top effort Opera. Looking forward to seeing where this ends up....

Looks pretty good considering what P5 did to something like this. Seems they have made quite a bit of improvement from P5 to P6. You would have had all her hair on one side and going through her head and neck with P5... that is if it would even render it. I haven't gotten a chance to play in the hair or cloth rooms yet. Ed

Pretty cool! Gotta play with the P6 hair room one of these days. Ah, so much to do, so little time...

I've learned a few things in the last few hours because I've got another animation with hair dynamics rendering. The strand hair item included with Poser 6 called Jessi Short Blonde...it has four components, Left, Right, LeftLite and RightLite. DO NOT MAKE A DYNAMIC FOR ALL! If you do, they whack each other around and cause chaos. I suspect you should either use the two regular OR the two lite, but NOT BOTH! I may try to run the Jessi Hair Toss render over with new settings if I can squeeze out the time in the next few days. Another tip to all who enter the world of dynamic hair: turning off "cast shadow" for the hair elements speeds things up, as you might imagine. ::::: Opera :::::

I suspect the biggest part of the "improvement" in the Hair Room in P6 is more realistic expectations. The Hair Room works, in P5 and P6, if you keep the models low-res.

I checked the skullcaps for P5 hair, and they were over 1,000 polys. The skullcaps for the P6 hair are only about 100 polys. That's just what people like Kirwyn and Softriver have been saying: the standard P5 dynamic hair is way too high-res to work properly.

I am working on a 530 frame animation at the moment with the same hair as in this one. When I ran the two dynamics, they calculated really fast...like watching in half slow motion. And then....during render the presence of the two dynamic files does not seem to slow down the render. That's pretty amazing. ::::: Opera :::::

Opera, I've played with animating hair as well. What happened was that Jessi's hair went through her face in a very noticeable way :( I'm wondering what settings can make the hair behave. I tend to wonder if the root stiffness has to be increased and the gravity decreased in order to avoid collisions with the figure...

are you saying that in my animation there are issues with hair going thru the model's face or bad collisions? Amazingly, I didn't even concern myself with any settings when running the dynamics here....just accepted the defaults. I WILL be fiddling, though, based on the suggestions I am getting in this thread. ::::: Opera :::::

I think he is saying is his animation the hair went through the face.

If collision detection doesn't work, it's probably because the model is too high-res. Either the hair or the figure, or both.

If it's hair you made yourself, try reducing the resolution of the hair. (Lower-res skullcap, fewer vertices, fewer strands, etc.) If it's hair that came with P6, try using a low-res "proxy" for collisions. A lower-res figure, or just a primitive to stand in for Jessi's head.

It was the red hair from P6 on the casual Jessi, which is lo-res. The hair went through the face as I was animating. In addition, the dynamics calculations completely changed the style of the hair as the hair turned flat when previously it had some volume...

interesting. when I go in to fuss with this hair toss animation, I'll try out that hair also. PBM, did the red hair have a "Lite" as well as regular element (can't look myself now, long animation rendering). Also, had you changed the Jessi Casual face with the poae room or face room morphs? ::::: Opera :::::

Just doing a very simple animation with Jessi Hires and the red hair. It has four hair groups, lefthair1, lefthair2, righthair1 and righthair2. No "lite" groups. The animation seems to work right (I checked collisions for her chest, neck and head), but it's not very fast (should have used a lores proxy). I haven't tweaked any of the hair dynamics setting. The hair is turning flat, as PapaBlueMarlin reports. But the strands are not going through her face.

Did you have a lot of other things in the scene? Clothing, props, other figures?

Try to do the hair animation early, before you add a lot of props, textures, etc. And if it doesn't seem to be working right, try re-starting Poser. If memory gets low, weird things happen in the Hair and Cloth Rooms.

If the hair gets too flat, you can try reducing the gravity setting.

If none of this helps, your computer may not be powerful enough to handle the sim. Using a low-res proxy instead will probably work.

Okay, I looked at it. I think the problem might be that the default hair starts out inside her head. The section that falls over her face sticks right into her cheek. I have a feeling this particular hairdo wasn't meant to be used dynamically.

I had not changed Jessi's head at all. What I did was pose her and animate between a series of the fight poses that come with P6. The only thing in the scene was Jessi Casual and the red hair. I still have the animation, but I have no means of posting it...