Attached Link: YouTube: Victoria 4 GoGo dance (dynamic hair trial)

I wanted to play with Poser's dynamic hair feature, and ended up making a complete animation. On one hand, it's impressive that you can do all this hair and cloth simulation on a 600 quid laptop - but on the other, it's still a long way off reality. Even if I was skilled in the art. :)

I used Kirwyn's Hair Proxy, and the dress is one I made myself with a gold lamé shader by bagginsbill, who also provided the stocking shader for Victoria 4's legs. The dance sequence itself is from Aragon Studios at poseranim.com.

Paid-for items include the skin texture (Rebelmommy's Tharyn) and the boots (Idler168's Chic Boots), both from the DAZ store.

Rendering was in Poser 6 (Poser 7 messes up the cloth simulation) and Postwork was with PostworkShop.

When I can get the render time together, I'll post a bigger version.

Impressive :)

Poser's dynamics are weird.  There are times in your animation where the hair is moving in advance of the head, straight against momentum.  No fault of yours I'm sure, just weird Poser.

(Even later to the party, Nance peeks over EBob's shoulder...)

You mentioned at YouTube, that it took 8-10 hrs to render the one minute piece.   Any guess how much the hair simulation added to the render time - compared to one done without it?

Thanks folks. It was just a try-out, mainly so I could see how dynamic hair responded to postwork, so it's good to see it so well received. I agree with all that pjz99 says and more - in some places I could swear that the hair stretches, which is just as weird. I suppose we could debate whether even weird dynamic hair is better than transmapped, but somehow I doubt that I'm getting close to the Uncanny Valley. ;)

Nance, the dynamic hair took some time to simulate, but Kirwyn's hair proxy speeds that up considerably since collisions are calculated against a low-poly stand-in. I didn't time it but I think it may have simulated faster than the dress did. It's hard to be sure since I did a lot of dress simulations, and only one hair sim right at the beginning and it's beginning to fade into the mists of time.

However, I'm fairly sure that the dynamic hair rendered faster than an equivalent transmapped hair mesh would. I quite often observe the rendering process slowing down when it gets to hair, whereas here it didn't. I did render without shadows, though. Don't pelt me with stones, I didn't have the time, and realism was not my aim in any case. :)

Splendid animation. cheerio lululee

Oh of course if you're animating dynamics is a million times better than poly hair, just gosh it does some weird stuff sometimes.

You have some control over how fast transmapped hair will render, in that you can turn min shading rate up - a lot of poly hairs have it set to zero, which is internally capped above zero or it wouldn't render, but still very small and much finer than is really necessary.  I think setting texture filtering to off also speeds up rendering, but the point of texture filtering is to improve animation quality anyway so meh.

I believe that dynamic hair is exempty from all forms of raytracing, which matters a lot if you're trying to render with IDL/GI or if it needs to appear in reflections.  I don't know what method it uses to produce shadows (if it even does).  Transmapped hair is brutally slow to render with IDL so I always make it invisible to raytracing anyway because I prefer my renders to actually finish.

I think it's a great start!

I enjoyed the anim.

yeah that looks really good well done bob.  very lifelike

Attached Link: Your Gold Dress @ YouTube

Thanks for the positive comments folks.

I've now uploaded a bigger version (PAL 720 x 576) which also has a faster frame rate - I think that's improved the look of the thing even though the dance-y goodness doesn't last as long now. :)

I like.  :thumbupboth:   Dynamics have come a long way. Keep up the work. :-)

Thanks. I did enjoy making this one, which means I have to do more, I suppose. It's a good thing I have nothing better to do. ;)

...and thanks for the pointer to the nice Aragon Studios animated dance pose freebie @ poseranim.com - I'd missed that one.