Well I have a silly problem with dynamic hair (Poser 6) When I do facial colseups, the skull and the roots of dynamic hair look like a cheap barbie doll, especially if the hair is combed back. I have tried a lot of lightning tricks (ambient occlusion vs.)with no success...The best solution I have found so far is increasing the amount of strands to enourmous numbers which is in fact a no-go... Is there a way to make dynamic hair look like it has realistic, dense roots, like Kozaburo hair?

Hello there is different option for this...You can play with the texture of the hair in the mat room.I often change the trans values. You can as well create a transmap for your haircap.(I most often do this with male's hair or very short hair for women. I don't really know if you can rival the Koz great styles.You can probably come close. here is an example of dynamic hair I did for my new female figure.

Oh I forgot to mention that I almost ALWAYS change the root and tip values in the hair room.I make them smaller for some "part" of the hair like the contour...Hope this can help.------ Nef

And here is a fast attempt of creating a beard for James.

The hair in post #2 looks VERY convincing, Neftis. I love Koz's hair, and I think it's the best object-based hair out there, but that example of strand-based hair you're showing us there seems to have much more depth and realism to my eye than any trans-mapped hair I've seen (without postwork). It has a lot to do with scene lighting as well I'm sure, as it seems to produce an excellent sheen (as would real hair). Great job. What was the rendertime for that image with that particular hair?

maxxxmodelz:Thanks for your comment:) The sheen is quite good, but it's simply because I darkened the specular in the material room. Poser strands are way too shiny by default.It will look more natural to change the specular just a bit.As for the render time, it's not more than usual..but for those who prefer saving time, use less vertices in the hair room.I sometimes do this for a preview and then increase for my final hair render.

At this point in time, IMO, dynamic hair still falls short in achieving the same sort of realism versus conforming hair in close-up shots. The real strength of dynamic hair is in full-body animation. If I used a long-style conforming type hair for animation, I needed to adjust the morph dials of the hair to be in sync with the figure's movement. This, as you can imagine, is very time consuming, and the results are often less than desired. With dynamic hair, on the other hand, one just runs a dynamic calculation and lets the computer do the work of adjusting the hair's movement to the movement of the figure. When set-up properly within it's limitations and with proper lighting, dynamic hair can be most convincing in animation and a whole lot easier.

Mychelle - that hair looks awesome. Tagging for later experimentation.

Neftis: thanks a lot for the help, and the pic. That hair looks real good...Using a transmap for the skullcap will probably do the trick for me. Kirwyn: My problem is the same here. I am generally stuck between animating the conforming hair or doing postwork for the dynamic...Both is a pain in the..well "back" :) Render times for good looking (dense) dynamic hair are also considerably longer...I have a fine machine (the longest WW conversion I have done so far -a full body conversion- took about 2 minutes) but sometimes I have to give up dynamic hair because of render time, especially if I am animating. If I am not mistaken, the fur/hair plugin for Lightwave had a way of rendering quite dense, full looking roots for hair really fast. It did some kind of intelligent post work depending on your hair settings after rendering. Maybe dynamic hair root rendering fix should be on the Poser 7 wish list...