I added Blinn to that previous setup. No visible difference whatsoever.

I am into dynamic hair for animation. Happy to report that in PoserPro2010 release, the collision function is improved. That is, it works faster. So, if you collide the hair against the head and neck it will definitely not penetrate and also you get relatvely faster simulation speeds.

Here's a still from one I am working on now.

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Poser dynamic hair animation "Hop"

Glance-up with dynamic hair
http://jrdonohue.com/mm3.mov

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Looks excellent, operaguy.

Of course, I wanna say you're cheating, because it's easier to get really dark hair to look realistic. :-D

here comes the blonde.....shortly!

Quote - 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.

Do you think it would be worthwhile to experiment with very subtle levels of transparency? I can't say I'm seeing much with my translucency settings.

Problem with translucency in Poser is that it isn't really translucency at all. Poser lacks an accurate translucency shader. That channel on the root node is pretty much an ambient one. Using it just makes the hair glow, which is why in many renders dynamic hair looks quite bright in the shadows - best not to use it at all.

Transparency with hair groups will most likely add a huge amount of time to renders, although I haven't tried. It doesn't strike me as the best solution, but who knows.

Hm, never thought about the render times. Thing is, I tried partial transparency on ears once, to fake SSS. Of course, that only worked if the key light behind was red, but it actually did have a pretty neat effect. But I'm thinking it may work with hair. No map, just set transparency to a very low %. Just a thought.

Carodan's tip is very important. Remove all transparancy and translucency from the hair shaders. You will never get any balance between the lights, the skin and the highlights in the hair with it on. I've struggled with that for a long time and am grateful for the tip.

This model started with Kate Hair (included with poser) but I delete the duplicate groups and only work with two, Left and Right. The default setting for Position Strength is .84 and in my opinion that is too limp. I increase it to .95 or so.

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Quote - 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.

yes i have a feeling that the Blinn shader is not good enough for skin. i am using Bagginsbills blinn settings for the skin. but i have a feeling that my problem is with the blinn node .

i have a feeling that the specular center is to strange.

I suggest it is time to say that the Poser world has come to a certain level with the release of PoserPro2010.

This hair module must be looked at with fresh eyes, as suggested by the posters above. It respects collision, the hair styling tools are sufficient, one you get used to them, the simulation engine is now strong.

With this lighting power, this great female model (V4), great skin (Lana elite) and now this hair....

I've been away from Poser for about a year, but the 120-frame animation i just created with long hair, collision on (the hair pours over her shoulders like water early in the animation)......I am back.

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P.S. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to work into an acceptable render time for the animation and start cooking it.

Hello, I wonder if SM plans to reduce the feature set of the "normal" Poser version. This screenshot is from their tutorials section. Layered animation, hair, dynamic cloth have been features of standard Poser since Poser 7 or earlier.

Best regards,
   Michael
 

WOW ! Dynamic hair is looking so much better than past days.  :)

Has anyone tried a hybrid? Say something like transmapped hair for the thick base and dynamic for thinner see through parts? Is something like that even possible?  I know nothing about either type of hair but wondered if a hybrid could gather the strengths of each.

Thanks for starting this thread Believable3d

Nice work Carodan and OperaGuy
As well as a big nod of approval to the humorous efforts of others! :-)

operaguy: Glad to hear that's your experience, but I certainly can't identify with some of what you say. I still have a terrible time with Poser putting hair inside the skull. Selection doesn't work properly for me. And IMO, the styling tools really do need some serious work. So there's a ways to go yet, although I know that I can personally improve with the tools that are available.

mike1950: Hybrid? Well, a lot of people use a textured skullcap. IIRC, Dixie Hair has some additional stuff with textures.

I am in PoserPro2010 so I'll only speak for that:

Collision must be "on" for the target(s) that the hair will collide against. In the starting position all hair guides should be outside the target mesh.  Naturally, "do collisions" must be on in the simulation choices.

Given those conditions, as long as there are normal flowing parameters checked, the hair guides stay outside the mesh.

As to rendered hair "seeming to" penetrate the mesh, I have not had that problem, so if that is what is happening for you can you post an example? Are the guide hairs going through the mesh?

I also have no issues with the select tools in hair styling. Select, deselect, translate, curl, pull longer with length constrain off, respect of tip/root in these operations....no problems.

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Quote - I am in PoserPro2010 so I'll only speak for that:

Collision must be "on" for the target(s) that the hair will collide against. In the starting position all hair guides should be outside the target mesh.  Naturally, "do collisions" must be on in the simulation choices.

Naturally. But that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Quote - Are the guide hairs going through the mesh?

I could post a multitude of examples. Hair penetrating/getting hidden in the forehead, especially, sometimes the cheeks. It happens nearly every render. Whether or not it's the guide hairs or the populated hair, the simulator should detect that.

Quote -
I also have no issues with the select tools in hair styling. Select, deselect, translate, curl, pull longer with length constrain off, respect of tip/root in these operations....no problems.

Yeah, I think there is a special problem between Poser and my system in that regard. I try to select a very small area, and it affects almost the entire head. I dunno what's wrong, but it's very frustrating.

And yes, I'm using PP 2010 (although I haven't tried the selection thing in the release version - I certainly had the problem in Poser Pro, P8 and the PP2010 beta).

Splendid thread. I think I will get back into dynamic hair. i especially like the hybrid concept.
cheerio
lululee

Quote - 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.

Carodan, there is something i don't understand here, you multiply the number of hairs by 300-400 or you add 300 to 400 hairs?
Generally i double the number and get good results, by multiplying by 300 seem out of reach of my computer...

Quote -

Carodan, there is something i don't understand here, you multiply the number of hairs by 300-400 or you add 300 to 400 hairs?
Generally i double the number and get good results, by multiplying by 300 seem out of reach of my computer...

I'm usually only increasing the number of hairs that high for a couple of groups - the upper ones generally. It has to be quite high because I'm also reducing the root/tip widths - when you render at a high resolution you start to see the thickness of the hairs and they can look too bristly for my eyes at lower res. But you're right, if I try and increase too many groups to that quantity the render bugs out, especially if IDL is being used.

It's really going to depend on how the hair is designed (and how long you're prepared to wait for a render) as to how far you can push things. A lot of dynamic hair doesn't quite work using settings like this because of how the groups sit on top of one another.

Take the 'Shena Hair' that I've been using a lot lately. For my latest renders (that I can't show just yet) I left a lot of the lower hair groups pretty much as they were, but actually raised the number of hairs in the topmost 'Links Oben' and 'Scheitel' groups to 400 whilst reducing their root & tip widths to 0.15 & 0.1 respectively. 
The result is that the lower groups with the courser settings act as a kind of backdrop to the upper groups that have a gorgeous fine quality (not unlike real hair). Without the lower groups adding volume you can see straight through the fine top layers to the background.

I just rendered a 1400 x 1000 pixel image with these settings (with quite high render quality) that took a little over 5 hours, but the results are really something in terms of fine detail.

I was trying to work out if there's an upper limit to the overall total number of  hairs that Poser can actually deal with but I've had varying results as to when a render has failed. It may be that it's dependant on what else is going on in the scene.

I also need to amend something I said earlier about turning off the 'Opaque in Shadow' setting on the hair node - you can't always do this, and not for all groups. I still can't quite get my head around what the hair node is doing. Specular is a bit of a struggle for sure.

my image above, which resulted in fine detail, deployed simply one group over the whole head. The setting was 35,000 hair strands with tip at .2 and root at .3 and took a few hours to render.

The hair was set invisible to raytrace. A shadowmap light with tight settings was on it, however.

If  the shot were closer, tip would have to go down to .1 or .15 as Carodan has stated.

the above image fails because of the issues at the scalp, but otherwise shows off wonderful rendering capability of PoserHair in my opinion.

Probably the reason my renders take a while longer because I leave RayTracing enabled. I haven't tried using depth-mapped shadows - I wish we could have per-object lights in Poser.

One more important factor - shading rate for hair. Best to keep it high via the settings in the object properties (I've been using shading rates of between 5 and 7).

Quote -
One more important factor - shading rate for hair. Best to keep it high via the settings in the object properties (I've been using shading rates of between 5 and 7).

Hm, I've been curious about that. The default is 8, which seems inordinately high to me. My logic tells me that high shading rates are going to make the hair blocky and lose detail.

Is your recommendation simply for the sake of render speed, or are you saying such high settings actually help quality somehow (as far as hair goes)?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that shading rate isn't such a great factor in rendering hair in so far as appearance is concerned (at least in Poser Pro 2010). There is a render time factor.

I'm not a scientist but I have run a few tests. In the test above I couldn't see any discernable visual differences in the second two renders which were both at what I consider to be fairly high and rediculously high shading rates.
The only difference comes with the first one at the shading rate of 0.25, which I usually render most other scene elements at. I can't quite work out whether the horizontal lines that appear are intentional or artifacts.

Notice how, at this very high root width, we can see a jagged structure to the hair strands.
Notice also the effect of the root softening.

Expanding on this, I've increased the number of hairs and reduced the root width to the default value of 1. We can see here that visually there seems very little difference in the renders where there a huge difference in the shading rates - but there are jaggies, as we might expect, particularly with the shading rate of 30. Note here that there isn't quite as large a render time difference between the low and high shading rates - curious. In the third render the effects of raising the pixel samples at render time are evident - smoothing out some of the jaggies. This does also rather dramatically increase the render time, but the quality is apparent.

One concern I had with relation to shading rate was with the effects of procedural nodes. I notice that most of the hair shaders seem to use a noise node. You might expect a higher shading rate on the hair group to interfere with these effects, but I'm beginning to wonder (in the latest Poser versions at least) if they are working quite as we think they are. More tests to follow.

Quote ---"Yeah, I think there is a special problem between Poser and my system in that regard. I try to select a very small area, and it affects almost the entire head. I dunno what's wrong, but it's very frustrating."

I have had this problem in the last few weeks and it affects earlier versions of Poser as well as Poser 8,which I currently use. After lots of cussing and hair tearing I remembered that my son bought me a new nVidia graphics card in February to replace my trusty ATI unit, swearing it would give me better performance.

This made me wonder if the open GL was working ok so I tried switching to SreeD and that fixed the problem. I can now select single hairs with no problem

Interesting. I already had rolled back my drivers because the updated ones lost all my Adobe fonts.

Will try that next time I'm working in the hair room. (Not much 3D time of late.)

I've been using dynamic hair (and dynamic everything else :p) for a long time.

Getting the hair to look realistic comes more down to your light setup than anything else. a low level IBL is generally the best way to go, so that the hair gets some light from all direction, and low-bias ray-traced blured shadows :p