I've spent the last two weekends experimenting with settings and styling tools and wind force.

I'm feeling discouraged and wondering if it's even possible to make
the hair fall smoothly over their heads.

Even trying with the stock strand hairs (studying Kate, Sydney, James2), hitting the calculate dynamics and resulting drape leaves a mess.

I did learn that I can adjust the tip/root falloff as I'm posing the hair.  
But after about 30 hours of tweaking settings and spot rendering, this is small consolation.

Is this a useless quest? 

Has anyone mastered the dynamic hair?

Is there hope?  Is dynamic hair product hype?

I remember a lot of discussion, when Poser 5 was still current, about how the collision handling for hair dynamics was bugged and didn't handle well.  I've never read anything since that would indicate that it was fixed.  But there is some suggestion that people may be making use of the strand hair, possibly shorter styles without dynamics.  Plenty of hair exists in the Free Stuff.

If you could get as far as mastering the design and styling tools, you have my admiration!  :D  Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow.  I think Douglas Adams summed up our Hair Room nicely.  LOL

Not a useful answer; sorry.  I'm rather hoping someone can come along and answer your question for both of us.  I guess Cage is either a forum parasite or a forum symbiote.  Hmm. 

I  personally, do think that dynamic hair, with some correct shaders, looks better than Transmapped hair. I agree that making dynamic hair is difficult, I have never succeeded, but there are some great samples in the freestuff, so others have ( just look for adorana!)
There must be some tutorials here at rendo, have you tried them?

Good luck and don't give up.

Bopper.

edit: Almost the same answer as cage, not very helpfull perhaps, but encouraging.

Perhaps this is a bit more useful: It's a serie of tutorials to create dynamic hair by Paula Sanders;

You can find it on the article section of her website:

www.perpetualvisions.com/

regards,

Bopper.

Looks much better then transmapped.
Do you remember "Shrek 2" scene when prince takes off his helmet and his hairs fly arround his head. That scene was made with dynamic hairs and looks great. After Shrek we have few Pixar movies but they never used dynamic hairs - too long render and calculating I think ;)

Poser is 150 times cheaper then Houdini and has similar tool. Only difference is that Poser dynamic hairs do not work :D It crashes more often then Italian cars. Only armpits dynamic hairs work well ;)
I wrote somethink similar few days ago:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2757998

I used dynamic hairs few times when I wanted make wet hairs and did not care about collision. In this case effect with ANY material looks better then transmaped.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve mastered the hair room.  But I’ve gotten to a point where I can’t bring myself to use a transmapped prop.  My breakthrough was when I stopped trying to drop a head full of hair from electric shock mode (every strand sticking straight out) into the exact style that I wanted.

At least for my work flow the key is to get good at the styling tools.  You can actually make a really convincing long hair look by styling two lines of hair (on either side of the part).  I start short, then grow (not with the length dial, but rather with the styling tools) the hair into the position I want.  I never even run a simulation because that almost always produces some funky stuff.  I know that defeats the purpose of having a simulator, but this way I get exactly what I want.

When I do need to simulate (either for animation or complex motion scenes) I make sure my gravity and bend resistance are balanced so that the hair doesn’t move “too much.”  One of my problems early on was I wanted the hair to act like a fluid and fill any gap as it draped onto a body.  But the more I watched my own girlfriend (she’s got hair down to her lower back) I realized it doesn’t act that way.  Yes it is flexible, but you have to position it into a funky style.  Left on its own it is fairly straight (curls and wavy hair not withstanding).

I’m not sure how much help that is.  But for me (producing mainly stills, rarely animation) “growing” generic short hair into long styles with the styling tools was the breakthrough moment.  Once you master that, you’ll be in a much better position to try and use the simulator.  Like I said, these days, I won’t even touch my collection of prop hair. 

edit:  that tutorial that booperthijs found looks like it covers the styling tools very well, or at least as in into.  Looks like a really good starting point and one I wish I'D found when I was starting out. with this.

Quote - ...Is there hope?  Is dynamic hair product hype?

I've never used the "Hair Room" or whatever it is in Poser 7.  I messed around with it in P6 but, I don't even look at that portion of the selection bar anymore.

That should tell you how I feel about it. :)

Some of my attitude is due to "operator error."  I admit that.  But, judging from the lack of information on the Hair Room in general and the lack of Poser Dynamic Hair, specifically, I would say that a good portion of the user-base feels the same way.

So, while I think that a trained and conditioned user armed with sufficient quantites of The Force and duct-tape can make the Hair Room do what they want it to do, it's above my threshold for frustration.

In fact, whenever I have used the Hair Room in P6, all I get is a voice telling me "This is not the Hair you were looking for.  You are free to go.  Move along.. "

Lengthening a bit at a time is giving more control of the hair curving over the head.

It looks like hair groups can't collision detect other hair groups.    It's pretty messy when one layer sinks into the one below.

I found adorana's web page

http://www.adorana.de

I think the room was before its time.  Even the cloth room is MUCH more advanced and many people don't use it.  I have no doubt that internet archeologists in 20 years will laugh at this thread where we questioned the usefulness of strand based simulations.  For realism sake ultimately only strand bases physics can match actual hair.  But for it to really take off SmithMicro will have to get more efficient in its code, utilize the full GPU and multi-core capabilities for simulations, or raw processing power will have to jump way ahead.  I'm not sure any of those three will happen in the P7 (or even P8) time-frame.  And it is simply too hard to master buggy software when trial and error take hours for each run.  That said, for me personally improvements to simulations of hair, cloth, and soft-tissue morphs are high on my priority list.  Keep trying!  Because even if it does take forever, the results of properly styles hair strands does look amazing.

In the short animation tests I've run, it looks amazing in motion. 

But, in face close ups so far,  it looks terrible.