Well, lkendall came through with a tutorial so complete that I did the deed... using blender nodes to add Jepe's Hair for M4 directly to my character without having to parent a second copy of Mike to it. I'm doing handsprings, because now the character looks exactly like I want him to, and it took me less than 15 minutes to do it!

Oh yeah. I know how blender nodes work now. Do you suppose this will help with other projects in the future? ROFL.

Thanks, lkendall. You're the best! And I wanted to say so and thank you publicly for your kindness!

-TW

Looking good :)

I'd love to see the tute :)

Me too :-)

As would I... is it a freebie, or ???

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1887226&user_id=343328&np&np

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1808005&user_id=343328&np&np

Example of blender nodes at work.

Here is my Site Mail to Doug:

Sorry to take so long to respond. I wanted to be accurate with step by step instructions. Some skin textures will have no body or facial hair, some will have a little, and some will have a lot. You can add hair with Jepe’s mat textures to any of these textures to create some variety.

Load a figure into Poser and load the textures with a MAT Pose.

Go to the Advanced Material Room.

Choose the figure and one of the material zones. The SkinTorso material zone is a good choice.

Disconnect the 2D Texture_Map node from the Diffuse_Color channel of the Poser Surface Node.

Add a Blender Node (the first option under the math nodes).

Plug the Texture_Map node into the top input_one channel of the of the Blender Node (the first channel).

Add a new Texture_Map node, and load one of Jepe's hair masks (it is black, and the hair is white).

Plug the hair Texture_Map into the of the Blender (Third) channel of the Blender node.

Change the Blending Value of the third channel on the Blender Node to “1.0”.

Click on the white color box of the second channel of the Blender Node, and choose a color for the body hair.

Now plug the Blender Node into the Diffuse_Color channel of the Poser Surface Node.

If you want the hair darker, you can attach the input_two (second) channel to the hair Texture Node.

You can also plug the Displacement channel (and/or the Bump channel) of the Poser Surface Node into the Texture_Map with Jepe's hair texture. You will have to experiment to find a good displacement value.

You can see these changes in the tiny preview windows in the Material Room, but you will not be able to see these changes in the Preview Window. You will need to make a render to see what you have done. If you want to use Displacement, you will have to choose that in Render Settings.

If you want to save some work for yourself, you can copy the Material setup to other material zones.

In the material room, with your mouse pointer in the nodes area, right-click your mouse and choose Select all, then right-click and choose copy.

If you were working on the SkinTorso material zone, then switch to the SkinHead zone. Right-click in the nodes area and choose Select all. Right-click and choose Delete, and right-click and choose Copy. If you make a mistake, you can Undo (Edit and Undo) what you have done.

Now you can copy the work to the SkinNeck, SkinNipple, and SkinHip zones. Repeat the setup process in the SkinArm zone, and copy the materials to the SkinFoot, SkinForearm, SkinHand and SkinLeg zones. For facial hair repeat the setup process on the SkinFace zone and copy it to the Lips zone. I think it is a waste of time to copy that material to the EyeSocket and Nostril zones.

Note: If you are using blenders with bagginsbill's VSS shader, using copy and paste will change the names of his special nodes, and make tweaking harder. In that case, making a Material file (in the material room) for a specific material zone,and loading that to other zones that use the same maps is the better option. After you have used those saved materials they can be deleted,and you can make a Material set of the whole figure to apply to other figures. :)

You can add several layers of body hair, or other features by stepping the blending process.

Post some renders of what your work.

LMK

Thanks a lot LMK :-)

HUGS
Lene

If there is any interest, I will try making some screen shoots of the Material Room when I get home, for folks who have trouble visualizing instructions. I like pictures myself, but the Site Mail does not allow them. What is the maximum size of JPG that can be uploaded here on the Renderosity forums?

LMK

 I didn't need any illustrations... your instructions seemed crystal clear to me. However, if you make it a full blown tut with illustrations I'll bet others will find it as useful as I did!

One thing I'm thinking about...
Displacement.
I usually use vein displacement.
I'm going to guess I could use a blender node for the hair and vein displacement, as well.

Whatcha think?
Is that the way to get both displaced?

It will be just GREAT with some screen shoots .................... Thanks a million :-)

HUGS
Lene

Silke, since you are not running a transparency map for either vein or hair, I believe an add math node would be more appropriate.

Silke:

Yes, you can blend Jepe's hair texture maps, and vein maps to use on the Displacement node. The white on black maps work best for this. I have not tried to blend the gray maps with black maps yet.

I have been so delighted with the efectiveness of blenders, I have not used the Math: Add node. It might be worth a try.

LMK

...and of course you can set up your VSS props with blender nodes and synchronize them to your figures with one click ;)

I'm sure I can.... but argh lol so many nodes to deal with, Vestmann :)

Gonna try the manual approach first, less nodes to deal with.
Then, when I get somewhere... I'll fiddle with VSS again :)

Nice :) Saving that.

My current problem is that I want less displacement on the hairy layer than on the veins layer.
The way I have it at the moment, the strength is set to 0.4 for the veins.
Blender node with:
Vein Displacement (and adjustment) on the top node.
Hair in the third (numerical) blending node, set to 0.2
(If I plug the hair into the middle node I may as well not use displacement on the hair at all)

Hello crinkly skin, because it displaces the skin as well as the hair like that. :)
Not quite the effect I'm looking for.

Trying to work out how to exclude the skin, but include the hair atm.
I'm guessing with a trans node, but again, that'll affect the skin as well... argh.

BB! 'Elp!

Use a Math:Add node to add two different displacement maps, assuming you want hair to be displaced equally regardless of whether it occurs on a vein or not.

The amount of displacement would be set in each value of the add node. Then the value in the displacement parameter would just be 1.

So - suppose you want .4 * veins + .2 * hair - that's all there is to it.

Right.
I was messing around with the math add earlier but couldn't get it right, I think it's because I left the displacement parameter amount at 0.4

I'm guessing you can't really do it so it displaces on top of a displaced map. (It's not a biggie for me, I'll live lol)
Well, you probably can... but I think my eyes would probably start to glaze over, as I imagine it would be a rather complex setup. :)

So the Math:add isn't going to work. At least not this way.

Settings for my acid victim are what you suggested, but with the hair disp increased to .4 to see if I can get the hair above the m4 displacement.

Ergo:
Displacement parameter = 1.0
Math:add = 0.4 for both materials

Result....

I took out everything including bump and whatnot, so the only thing are the blender node with the hair and skin, and the math add with the hair and m4 disp.

I reduced the displacement parameter to 0.2, because 1.0 was complete overkill. :)

Looks to me like the hair is still displacing the skin.

Silke:

What units of measure are you using (in preferences)? It will make things easier trying to match your results, and make suggestions. I have never converted myself from PNUs, but I can change my preferences for this.

Also, is that displacement map close to middle grey (between black and white)?

LMK

I use inches.

The displacement map is the one from Daz, so yeah, it's a normal map, hence the displacement adjustment to be able to use it in Poser. (64bit tif)
Still playing with nodes... I have some wild setups atm lol. (Still not working as I want it though)

I wasn't suggesting those numbers - they were examples.

What I'm saying is whatever number you used for the vein displacement map in the past, keep using that number in the Add node. Whatever you used for the hair displacement in the past, keep using that number in the Add node.

The numbers I wrote were ridiculous - .2 for hair? You can't displace the hair that far - it's not real hair. You just want a suggestion of 3d to it - something like .02 inches.

Folks:

On the Material Room screen capture that Silke shared in the above post, the blender set-up attached to the Diffuse_Color channel of the PoserSurface root node, is exactly what I suggested. The node set-up attached to the Displacement channel is not what I suggested. I am not saying it is wrong, just that I have never experimented with the Math_Functions:Add node before.

I might add, if there is a color in the Diffuse_Color channel other than white. That color should be moved to Input_1 of the Blender node, and the Diffuse_Color channel should be set to white. Otherwise you will be mixing the color on the Diffuse_Color channel with the color of the skin texture AND the body hair.

LMK

Yeh, the displacement messing around was my idea. :)

BB, I get what you're saying, but the trouble is, the displacement of the M4 Displacement map eats the hair displacement if it's too low.
And yeah, those values are too high, but they give me an idea of where the hair actually is on the map and when it gets eaten. :)

I don't understand what you mean by "eats the hair displacement".

If a vein is .1 inches above the rest of the skin, and a hair is .02 inches above the vein, then the sum is .12. It is not lost.

I think a lot of my issues have to do with the actual hair map, rather than the displacement settings, which is part of why it looks... off. (I'm working with much lower settings atm.)

It's pretty much what you got above, except I don't use a blender node for the veins, because it's also muscular -- but I really like the idea of adding blue veins... I'll have to play with that a bit hehehe

Earlier, the vein/muscle displacement bulked over the top of the hair displacement -- smoothing it out. Basically, there was no hair in places.
Can't reproduce it though, so it might have been just a glitch.

I know I sound like an idiot, but I am trying to get my head around it. :)

Okay... so what you're saying is, if I have any addition at a lower value, it always gets added on top?

What I'm getting at is, how does it know what to add on top? i.e. say I had the vein at 0.1 and the hair at 0.2 (for arguments sake), as long as the hair is in channel 2 of the add node, it's added to the top of whatever is displaced in channel 1?

Is that right? Or have I got myself into a total muddle trying to understand where things get added?

If I plugged the hair into channel 1 and the vein into channel 2 -- that wouldn't work, right?

Channel 1 gets displaced first, then channel 2 is added on top of that. Yes?

It's not perfect, but as I said, I think that's down to the hair map, not the settings. (It wasn't intended to be used that way, but hey.... it saves me having a second M4 in the scene.)
Here is what I ended up with.
Will post the node settings in the next post.

EH?

There is one displacement. When you add two maps together, the displacement will be the sum of the two. (Multiplied by the factors in the add node, of course)

Every spot will find out how much to displace be calculating the sum.

It doesn't matter which is lower. This is not layering.

3 + 5 is the same as 5 + 3 - order doesn't matter.

You know that you've pretty much lowered the hair displacement to the point that it isn't visible anymore, right?

If we call the value of the body definition map d and the hair map h, you have:

.4 * (.4 * (d - .5) + .01 * h)

Multiplying the outer .4 across the sum, that is

.16 * (d - .5) + .004 * h

You can't see 4 thousandths of an inch, especially with the texture filtering you have going there.

According to my expert Googling grin, black human body hair averages about .008 to .01 inches in diameter. Assuming those hairs are lying perfectly flat against the skin, your .004 is half what it should be.

Displacement has limitations when trying to achieve realistic looking body hair. Real hair is attached at only one end, and most of it is not flat against the skin. Displacement cannot detach the "hair" from the skin, and when the hair colored skin is displaced from the surface, the sides will be skin colored or show reflection. If you cannot see the top well, you will not see the hair color. It will look like wrinkled skin. If you look at bagginsbill's ball example, you will see places where the hair color cannot be seen (lower right side of the ball).

If you want a more 3-D effect, then you will need to use Jepe's solution. Add a second M4 to the screen, inflate it with Jepe's inflation morph, texture it with the hair maps, and make all the rest of the figure transparent. The hair will then appear to be raised off the skin because it is. It should cast shadows, and look a lot more like hair. The hair can even be displaced. This method will also need all of the overhead of a second figure in memory, but Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010 can handle the added work.

A caveat to remember. It is better to copy the figure already morphed and posed (in the Edit Menu), parent it to the original figure, and texture it with Jepe’s body and facial hair textures. Do not conform the second figure to the first, or it will lose its morph settings. If you change the morphs and poses in figure one, you will need to do the same in figure two.

LMK

Righty ho!
Thanks for the explanation :)

Okay, Mr. Expert Googler (I shall refer to you as BBEG henceforth. Seeing as we all do that to you. Beg, I mean. Not google. :P)
Clearly I need to google dark body hair more often...
eyes BBEG cautiously, wondering how one googles bodyhair without ending up at sites with dubiously nekkid people on it.

Besides, I broke him with VSS! lol
(I knew I would!)
Clearly more practice is in order.

Gonna play more tomorrow. I think I know what is going on, but it's late, and my boss tends to like it when I arrive at work on time. :)
If he knew what I do to his coffee, he wouldn't force me to get up at the crack of dawn...

I googled "human body hair diameter" - the word diameter pretty much resulted in non-porn. Although one might suppose that could go either way. grin

If it's me googling it -- it's gonna go the other way.
I think Google does it deliberately.
I'm the only person who'd end up with pron at work when I google something like "3 port valve" - and that's despite the pron sites being blocked!

I'm dropping this here just because I had a mail session with Anatis (@DAZ, Silke here, I'd guess) about it and she(?) pointed me here. I've not read the thread yet so apologies on that score, and this was one of my earliest experiments in the Material Room so some things are a little funky.

Render is here:

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=1719732#1719732

Screen shot of a material is here:

http://harpsichordyet.com/gallery2/main.php/v/Misc/Hairy+Material.jpg.html

Whichway