Thanks Jen.

One of the things about prop based hair that's always bugged me is that from certain camera angles you pretty much always 'see' the structure of the polygon strips in one way or another in the final render. However good the textures are this is problematic for me. You've also got the problem of multiple layers of transparency in the more complex arrangements which don't always play well with advanced lighting and shaders. For very simple, close fitting styles you don't run into these issues so much, but it's still one of the things I tend to notice straight off in realistic renders.

Dynamic hair has, for a very long time, suffered from hefty render overheads. The only way we were able to use it without waiting days for it to render (if at all) was to optimise the strand counts & width settings to the point where it just never looked remotely close to realistic except maybe from a distance - hence to a degree the coarsness in appearance. Subsequently the few people who braved the hair room and made some of the hair pieces that fester away in freestuff were probably limited to achieving a certain level of refinement by not being able to effectively test what they were making. These valiant efforts have perhaps been further stunted due to Poser's hair room tools never really having been developed since ther introduction in version 5. There are good (very good) examples of dynamic hair out there but IMO most of them still lack a finesse in their construction.

So, until recently we've never really been able to refine our settings to reveal the full potential of dynamic hair. PP2012 has taken a huge step forward in terms of the speed we can render dynamic hair, so we've now been able to start refining it with the tools that have been there all along. We can lower the root and tip widths to very low values whilst at the same time dramatically increasing strand counts to maintain a full body of hair. I think the results are far better than we've ever been able to achieve in the past.

This isn't to say that there arn't still improvements that can be made to the dynamic hair tools in Poser, but we can at least use the ones that are already there to better effect.

 

PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.

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