Hi,

I've been away from Poser for a while but since I'm upgrading to a 64 bit system the program offers more possibilities for me to test.  One thing I've noticed though is there have been few if any new dynamic hair models.  In fact I've seen a few of them disappear like "Foxy Hair" in free stuff and "Rio Hair" over at RuntimeDNA.

At the same time I've noticed new dynamic hair for Carrara that beats anything made yet for Poser.  Is there something I don't know?

 Dynamic hair has (sadly) never been much used. It's too bad, bec ause PROPERLY made dynamic hair beats most transmapped hair any day. Plus if you animate, it's more or less a must.

But since a lot of people seem to shy away from anything but the Pose Room... Well telling them you have to go into another room to use a hairpiece.. isn't likely. It's hard enough to get people to use dynamic clothes, although this has taken off lately. Perhaps Dynamic hair is the Next Fad? It certainly renders a LOT better in Poser 8 /PP2010 - I guess a lot of people were put off by the original plastic look it had in Poser 5 and never bothered to check it again.

Dynamic hair can take a lot of time & effort to get looking realistic, most people don't really want to put in the hours to get it just right & would rather something they can use in a couple of minutes.

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But since a lot of people seem to shy away from anything but the Pose Room... Well telling them you have to go into another room to use a hairpiece.. isn't likely. It's hard enough to get people to use dynamic clothes, although this has taken off lately. Perhaps Dynamic hair is the Next Fad? It certainly renders a LOT better in Poser 8 /PP2010 - I guess a lot of people were put off by the original plastic look it had in Poser 5 and never bothered to check it again.

Whoa....there are other rooms besides the pose one?  NO...get out!  :biggrin:

Honestly I've been meaning to crack down and play with dynamic hair, my first attempts made chia pets look stylish..no really .  My main problem is getting the base hairs so they look somewhat normal and not all like bride of Frankenstein. 

I've not used any of the existing hairs since I really want to learn to do it myself, which may be part of the problem, but also most of the fun!

The cloth room is still popular, and I use it a lot myself, but I've never seen a good looking dynamic hair yet.. :(

I tried doing them myself and had very little success.. All the dynamic hair products I've seen, free or elsewise look completely unnatural..

Maybe most of us haven't figured out how to use it well.. 

My trial was to make (or find) a good looking, long, dark, wavy female hair.. Haven't seen anything that even comes close to looking half decent.. 

I agree with Trekkiegrrl on animations..   I've have not had much success with conforming, transmapped hair in animated scene. (Same problem as with conforming clothing thath as a lot of fabric), it just looks stiff and unnatural when the character moves...

There's plenty of good looking dynamic clothing, and more is made every day now..

If anyone succeeds in figuring out how to make nice long wavey female hair that's dynamic and looks realistic, I'd be first in line to pay for it!

I wonder if anyone has tried making hair that works in the Cloth Room?

That is, the strands are just transmapped onto the mesh, but the whole
thing is rigged with Constrained Groups for the stiff parts, Choreographed Groups for
the wavy parts, etc.

Yeah actually, there's one in the marketplace.  I tried it out, but it looks a bit flat, kind of like hair textured cloth... Which basically it is. :)   I give kudos to the merchant for trying hard...

And for more far distance renders, it works fine, but I'd like to see something that has more depth, and more detail especially a bit more close up. I tried making a similar hair myself half a year back, but I had similar problems with flatness.. 

Has anyone tried the dynamic hair in Carrara?

There hasn't been very many options for dynamic hair.  I do see that there are one or two in the MP now, which is nice, because dynamic hair has so much more potential than other hair.

i did an experiment with clothifying the Mark hair

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTptEUWoKN8

it can be done,
it's just gonna take more experimentation,
**and lots of help!, **
to make something useful for animation work.

Hello,
there have been a few style in the RMP by Kaiz, unfortunately not many vendors
pick up this chance, plus it is hard to find dynamic Poser hair.
It would need an own category and a couple more people supporting it.
It definitely deserves the support, because if well made, it looks soo much better
than the transmapped ones, where often you have these build-in highlights .
And yes, P9 should add a couple of features for it to improve it even more.

Best regards,
   Michael

I would really like to use dynamic hair, myself, but the design tools don't seem very accessible.  The fact that the design tools steer like a cow might be part of why dynamic hair has never caught on.  :lol:  I think it's also difficult to export dynamic hair for use in any kind of external rendering program.  Possibly the intertwining of Poser and D|S markets for so long has held Poser's dynamic hair back (if I'm not mistaken in thinking that D|S offers no support in this area).

I'd really like to see better dynamic hair design tools in future versions of Poser.  Something which allows some control using parameter dials, instead of the clumsy mouse-drag interface.

Joe bushido in the marketplace just put up a dynamic cloth hair.   Haven't used it, but if you are into dynamics, there's still a little potential.

Thanks for the feedback people.  This bugged me enough that I called SmithMicro today and spoke to a guy in tech support.  He told me the MP vendors who put out dynamic hair styles "sold as many as I can count on my one hand" and said there just wasn't a demand for it.

I beg to differ.  There hasn't been a new Poser dynamic hair model in MP for three years and in that time computers have gotten a lot faster, Poser now runs 64 bit and between P5 and P-pro the dynamic calculations can only have gotten better.  Also if there's no demand for dynamic hair then why is DAZ releasing Carrara dynamic hair models on a more regular basis?  And why do they look so much better than the ones for Poser when Poser has had such a long head start?

I must add the guy at SmithMicro tech support was very interested in my concerns about this.

 there is a new one just a couple of days ago here in the MP. It looks quite good except for some funny curly bits on top like wire loops. If it had had bangs (fringe) at the front I probably would have tried it out though.
Love esther