Okay, I've got into this and would love to see what you're doing.

The accompanying image is brutally bad, and I'm aware of it. But it's my first-ever attempt at creating hair myself in the Poser Hair Room, and my first-ever test render of said attempt. (I'm using the skull cap from PhilC's Hair Designer as the prop base; it's set to invisible.)

Now that you've seen the worst, show me something nice. :)

Heehee. This hairstyle is a mess! But I'm having fun. This was rendered with mid-level quality settings (no IDL, 0.2 min shading rate, 77 irradiance cache) in 11 minutes 15 seconds. (Click for full size.)

Wonderful work and fantastic to actually see someone experimenting with what is one of the least used and understood "rooms" in Poser.

You are doing things just fine and you will get even better.

It's a pity that the Hair Room isn't more interactive with the user but that must wait for even faster CPU's !!

I've attached some of the stuff I've done lately as you did ask :)

Thanks for sharing yours, Believable :)

Hey, thanks for the post. Looks like you've been having some fun there! :)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1536314&user_id=472534&np&np ignore the terrible rig, enjoy the fabulous hair
a bit of nudity there

Beautiful piece of work and great render!

LOL, pjz! Love that hair. But it may be a bit hard on her neck if the wind ever stops. :)

hborre: that really looks quite good.

Here's my first IDL render with the Poser Pro 2010 beta. Just a default style of KaiZ's Crinkly Hair, with a bit of material mods. (Click for full size.) EDIT: Meh. That's SHORTY Hair, not Crinkly Hair.

Okay, here's a W.I.P. of a hairstyle I'm working on now that I've figured out a better workflow. This time I created all my hair groups before growing any hair.  :)  I also have a bit better handle on what display modes to use, but I wish there were some better options for seeing existing groups while editing (maybe they're there but I haven't found them....)

Click for full size.

One thing that Poser's dynamic hair does not handle very well (or at all) is the hair line.  Any place on the model where you will have the hair line visible, you probably need to define multiple groups.  In other apps like Cinema you could define a distribution map and paint a more natural looking hair line, in Poser you have to put in quite a bit more work placing some variation all along the hair line.

FWIW, I think I'm pretty close to having this hairstyle where I want it "structurally." Probably time to work on the material settings. (Click for full size.)

I have to play even on Christmas!

Just posted this in my gallery. Believe it or not, it's actually the same hairstyle you see above - just didn't run the dynamic sim. Thought it looked intriguing the way it was. No postwork except for enlargement. Original was 808x689 px. I didn't time it, but it couldn't have taken more than 5 minutes. (P8; irradiance caching = 98; 2 raytrace bounces; min shading rate 0.21; HSV Exponential @ 1.30; lighting provided by two raytrace spotlights. No IDL.)

Couldn't resist an IDL render. This rendered in just under 25 minutes @ 808x689. Scene is Silent Illumination from DAZ; morph is a slightly modified Hayden (which I believe is a celebrity freebie from Rogerbee).

Degenerated ?  Not at all. All your creative and exciting work is wonderful to behold !

It' great to see how things are panning out for you and your obvious joy in these outcomes.

There is so much that the old Hair Room is capable of ith some effort and good on you for getting into it.
Soon you'll be the Jedi of the Hair room :)

I saw mentioned that the hair line was a bit too bold for some folk.
Using the "soft root" option often will give the hair line a more organic look as will a more tesselated mesh in the appropriate area.

By the way, I don't yet have Poser8. Can you tell me, Believable, if you've noticed any speed ups with Poser8 in the hair Room ?

I've just attached a render that I did and like you I stopped it part way through the sim. !!

Please keep up your very informative and valuable posts and renders !!

Thanks for the encouragement and thoughts, coltrace.

I can't give firsthand info regarding relative speed difference between P8 and earlier versions, as I never used the Hair Room before. The simulations are a funny thing... with the style I'm working on, the little parts on the sides at the bottom are VERRRRRRRRRRRRRRY slow and sometimes even crash the program. But the rest simulate quite quickly.

However, Bagginsbill has said that there were marked performance improvements for dynamic hair in P8. I don't know if that means just for rendering or for dynamics calculation as well. All I do know is that there is no comparison between rendering dynamic hair and transmapped hair in P8. Dynamic is much faster, and usually I like the look of it better too, even though I have a lot of really great transmapped hair products in my runtime. (I kinda got addicted to buying hair and casual/everyday type clothes, which is why my hard drive is bursting.)

That's an... interesting render. :)

Some tips on styling:
- use different display settings : outline for selecting the hair, and cartoon wtih lines for styling, the rendered and shaded displays make the hairs less visible.

• learn how to use the styling tool and especcialy the slider, when you select a couple of hairs and move them it depends on the slider how they bend, start with the root, bend it a litlle, move slider and bend it a little more, untill you almost to the tip and you have the curve you want.
• I hardly use the rotate and twist tools, I find it rather difficult to control, moving and scaling are IMHO the best tools to work with.
• When you want to style curly hair, set the kink strength to zero, straight hair is easier to style then curly hair, after you're finished with styling set the kink strength back to how you wanted it.
• Raise the verts per hair to about 60, it makes the hair smoother.
• There was a bug in poser 8 with selecting the hairs in openGL, I don't if it;s fixed but when you're having problems to select it, use SREED instead.
• Don't be afraid of a high hair density , it makes it look more real, and I didn't noticed a very big raise in rendertime. Just switch off  "show populated" when you're finished, because it is slow in preview mode, you don't need to switch it on again for rendering.

just my two cents.

I'm still not very happy with the hair shader, which seems to change with every lighting setup. But I've noticed there's also a thread about hairshaders, so perhaps I can learn there something usefull.

best regards,

Bopper.

Thanks for the thoughts, bopper. That's looking pretty good. :)

Valuable and wise comments there, Bopper and many thanks for them.

I was lucky enough to be invited to ine of the Goldcoasts leading graphics labs. here in Australia.

They use Poser7 with a quad setup and a Nvidea Quadro FX3000.

The guy in charge said it took just about two days to configure the Quadro to accept Poser but wowie what results they get !

No more messing about with "show populated". Just leave everything on full and the preview window just hums along. No stutters or stammers. No halting or stopping when panning or rotating.
So smooth and the preview render looks so bloody close to a final render it would drop the jaw of anyone.
However the price of such fluidity is about the price of 4 excellent computers with monitors !!
Too expensive for me. I'll stick with my old openGL card for now but I'm saving up !!
Thanks again for those words of wisdom, Bopper and more piccies please !! :)

Just a quick edit..
It was a FX4800 !!
I've got the cheaper one (FX3000)
Donations accepted by the way :)

Attached Link: Dynamic hair and cloth plus BVH motion capture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjoQGfeLqYo

Quote - Dynamic hair is also useful for other purposes, as in the fringe on this costume.

Could you give a broad overview of how you did this? it seems perfect for a sniper suit i'm wanting to do.

Quote - Here is a short video using Lululee's Dynamic hair. It worked very nicely for me, but I haven't figured out how to change colors yet.

You're talking about changing colours with her own set, or altering them to do something custom? You'll need to apply them in the material room. Dynamic hair is prop based and unfortunately you can't just apply a pose to change colours. So go to the Material Room, and for Dixie's own colours, go to the Materials library, and you'll find !lululeeHairColors. Select from there.

As for custom colours and adapting Lululee's work, you may be interested in this thread:

Purchased dynamic hair

Vince Bagna also shows some simple hair shader setups in this thread:

IDL and dynamic hair

... and dadt shows how to do multiple colours in this thread

Some dynamic hair questions

HTH.

These pics show the Poser7 hires prim.plane selected as the hair group and the "hair" colour changed to suit.

Its a great way of making 3D grass and very very quick to render.

The "puppet" I made was for a kiddies show and again the Poser7 hair room came to the rescue with almost believable "straw".

The curly fella was jus for fun and consisted of over 100000 hairs!
Even the opengl card had fun when rotating this in the preview window !!
A normal games card just froze straight away.

Thanks Believable for this thread!!  :)

Great examples there, dadt !
Thanks.
It can look nice if one randomly selects a few vertices and
adds another small group to create a different, less mathmatical look to the outcome.
A few thinner and bendier strands added in can give a more "organic" feel to the render.

Attached Link: Dynamic hair and cloth with BVH

Now that I have figured out how to get my hair to move with V4, I've been doing a bit more work with the dynamics controls. Here's V4 doing a pretty sharp bend.

For those who aren't aware, the Gravity setting is a bit unintuitive (to me, at least): negative values means stronger gravity, positive values essentially means anti-gravity. So if you want the hair to fall down, you need to slide left. In this little test, I discovered that you probably need to have a bit more gravity than the Hair Room gives you by default if you want hair to fall forward properly in a position such as this. In this image, most of the hair groups are set at about -0.000600. (I think the default is somewhere around -0.000350 IIRC.)

Don't forget that how the hair falls is not only affected by the gravity setting but also by the spring strength, bend resistance, position force and root stiffness.

Yes. :)

Especially position force and bend resistance, I think.

One of the unfortunate things about the Poser manual is that while they briefly explain the Dynamics Controls parameters, they never give you a hint even what direction does what. (That aside from the fact that their explanations sometimes barely do more than repeat the name of the control, so the uninitiated aren't gonna necessary get it.) And since these are strictly dynamics settings, you get no visual feedback at all until running simulations... which is very time-consuming.

Similarly with the Styling Controls. No real explanation how the Falloff setting works (thankfully I managed to finally find that info on another site).

But my biggest problem remains selection. It seems to be my computer, because I watched a Youtube video and the guy had no problem selecting the hair he wanted. I dunno. Very frustrating, anyway.

Yes, I started revisiting dynamic hair as well a few days ago, since I read that in the recent
Poser versions it renders much faster than transmapped hair. Plus, for transmapped hair,
80% of all I bought look crappy.

I got the KaiZ collection (currently on sale) here at RMP, also at RDNA
there are currently a lot of dynamic hairstyles for V2 and V3 at low prices.
What should I say - they look much better than most current V4
transmapped hair styles.

Below is my work in progress - the Dixie hair here from RMP.
My intention is to start with bought styles, but to customize them for my renders.

Best regards,
  Michael
 

no offense guy. the hair just doesnt look right. i think its the problem from Poser.

to me the messy edges and less than perf ect syyling are....Pertfect

Suggestions how to improve them are welcome!
I improved it a bit with more combing, but it's also not yet the color I want.

Best regards,
   Michael

Quote - Thought I'd revive this thread. Hopefully more folks are doing dynamic hair renders now. This is She Who Must Not Be Named wearing one of Adorana's free dynamic hairstyles (for V3, IIRC). I didn't do any styling, but I did replace Adorana's materials with mine.

Can you explain a little more what your material settings were? That's really nice.

Thanks
Mark

I think one of the problems using existing dynamic hair props is that most were set up some time ago prior to some of the rendering performance developments of the latest versions of Poser (P8 & Ppro2010). They were set up with the limitations of the software at the time.

What I've been starting to find is that we can take some of those props and make some adjustments, namely increasing the number of hairs and reducing the root/tip widths in each dynamic group. Exactly to what degree you might choose to do this will still depend on the particular group and how long you're prepared to wait for a final render.

I took Shena hair by Adorana and upped the number of hairs in some of the top groups to 300-400, and reduced the root/tip widths to 0.2 or 0.3 and 0.1 - see the results of this in the most recent renders in my gallery. What you start to do in this way is produce a head of hair with realistic hair numbers and dimensions.

The drawbacks, aside from render times, are that you find that some of the hair groups may begin to interfere with each other in terms of how the shaders render under certain lighting conditions (over-shadowing becomes a problem in areas, IDL can be interesting). It may be that the approach to making dynamic hair props needs to change somewhat to accommodate what the renderer can do now.

Hair shaders might need some adjustment also - I found that I no longer needed to have the 'opaque in shadow' box ticked on the hair node (the hair was doing this by virtute of the sheer number of hairs). I've also stopped using translucence in the shaders, only using tiny values to create a slight lift to tones where necessary.
TBH I'm not entirely sure how the hair node works, and I've had quite a few unexpected and disappointing results from long renders. Perhaps in time some of the shaders in the material room will need to be upgraded to account for recent advances in lighting and rendering options.

But with Poser 8 and pro2010 a realistic dynamic hair has suddenly become a lot more feasible.

Glad you posted here, Carodan. I saw that note you made about root and tip widths in your gallery and more people should know.

I doubt it can end up as a sticky here, but as I continue to learn I may put up a page of dynamic hair tips on my web site.

BTW, I know it seems there are not a lot of dynamic hairstyles available, but there are more than you might readily find. Not only Dixie (which of course is explicitly advertised as such) and the ones by KaiZ (which you can only discover by actually looking at the product page - I don't think it comes up in search); a number of Adam Thwaites (MostDigitalCreations) characters also come with basic dynamic hairstyles, and his characters prices are very good value.

A tip for you if you use Adam's hairstyles: his as-is material settings will not get you good results, as the hair is far too thick. (I think that's why pretty much all his renders are of black hair, which is easier to make look reasonable.) You will need to either take Carodan's advice above and reduce root and tip widths, or else reduce density by a lot (in my renders, I've cut the density of his hairstyles to about a third of what he had).

Thanks. I'm just learning; took advice on material settings from a number of people here. I actually forgot to make some pretty important corrections to my material settings - as you'll see I'm using the Alternate_Diffuse channel, but I've got the regular Diffuse_Value set at .63. So I'm violating some good principles. I didn't post to say "what a great render," but more to kickstart the thread. (If you want to see great dynamic hair - not to mention dynamic clothing - renders, take a look at the last few in Carodan's gallery.)

I should add: it seems to me that Adorana's hair does not respond well enough to gravity. I think you need to reduce e.g. Position Force, maybe Bend Resistance etc.

Hm, wait, there's specular on the hair node... I don't think I need Specular_Value on?

A lot is going to depend on the lighting you use.

P.S. re-hair dynamics - yeah, I had trouble getting the Adorana hair to respond to dynamics (part of the point I guess). It still looked far better than similar transmapped styles though.

Oh, I think I played with the 'clumpiness' settings also - gave it a less perfect feel.

Here's my latest render, after I fixed my material settings a bit (and gave it a bit more light). I also downsized the root and tip widths as per Carodan's advice, although I didn't increase the hair counts dramatically.

i am noticing that the hair shaders dont have the blinn node. i dont know if this node even works. but look at some pictures from real hair. look what happens when a light is behind hair.

its looks very different then in poser.

I think I tried Blinn early on in my dynamic hair experiments, but didn't care for the results. However, I probably wasn't using it correctly.

I tried a full blown shader setup with blinn but it didn't have the same results as using it on a solid object. I'm not sure for certain how the shading works for the dynamic strands produced in hair groups. I think it's not quite the same as considering it like the mesh surface of a solid object.
We could use some input from bb I suspect.

When you think about it though, a strand of hair is very translucent. It may be that the effect of strong light shining behind hair isn't quite the same as the specular effect you get with the Blinn node in any case. And it's worth remembering that even Blinn is only one model of a surface specular reflection effect. I've been considering this a lot lately with skin, where I've really started to want a more accurate specularity for use with IDL.

Hello,
I played with the shaders a bit. I like what happens when you replace the noise node by
a clouds node. This gives  bigger areas of colors.
The hair node seems to be very special, the color is mainly driven by u/v, but
from the hair root to hair tip, it has some additional parameter you don't get 
with other nodes (or, in other words, without the hair node, I was not able to 
obtain which changes color from root to tip.)

Carodan, your settings are very aggressive, I also reduced the hair thickness,
but only to 0.6 for root and 0.3 for tip. Your renders look very good, which proves
that the additional reduction is worth it!
I also double the number of hair segments in general, that gives smoother
bends.

It is possible to use an additional blinn or anisotropic for hair, but with too much
light, the hair easily looks washed out / grey then.
With even tiny bits of translucency, the hair did not look good any more.

Best regards,
  Michael