Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: Trick to add extra strands to hair for realism.

Mark@poser opened this issue on Mar 28, 2010 · 18 posts

Mark@poser posted Mon, 29 March 2010 at 7:14 AM

I did a higher quality render last night. This was with raytracings set to 3 and pixel samples set to 3. I still did not turn on raytracing for the hair however, so I will do that today and see what happens. The loose strands are still visible and the effect still looks good to me. The render I posted below took about 1 hour on my PC.

For those of you interested., here's how I did it. Basically, you follow these steps:

  1. Generate a obj copy of the hair. You do this by going under FILE> EXPORT>OBJ. Select only the hair. Deselect all options for export. Call it My_Hair or something and note what directory you put it into.

  2. Load the obj hair back in. This is under FILE> IMPORT>OBJ. Deselect all options. The hair should come back in exactly on top of the hair you had before. Some of the textures may come back, but in P7, I noticed the transmaps did not come in. That's okay. If the hair originally was a prop, you may be able to just duplicate what's on the figure rather than doing this and step 1.

  3. Copy over the existing shader network under the material for the original hair to the new obj form. Go to the MATERIAL room and selected everything for the chosen hair portion. Go to your new hair and for the same group paste it in place. The idea here is to have essentially two copies of the hair in place on the head when you're finished with the same shaders for each.

  4. Add in a new visibility shader as shown in my next post for the new hair. This runs streaks thru the existing visibility transmap (black lines) so that only a few fine hair strands are visible. The All Back hair has the hair strands running essentially vertical, so the mapping was done to insert vertical gaps in the hair transmap. With other hair styles, this may not work, but most I've seen are vertical.I used the tile shader, but there may be something better.

  5. Scale the new hair slightly larger than the old hair. To see the new strands you need to raise the new hair up. I scaled the hair in size a few percent and then a few more in Y Scale. I think you could just move it up also.

 

It may help to tint the hair a red or green during the first few renders to see the size and aid in more strands or more spread between. them.  I'm sure some people here will figure out improvements to this. Please post those.

 

Good luck