Well, most of us have great rendersoftware and our Vic looks photoreal at last. Yes, there is good hairs in the shops, but on close-up renders this hair isn´t real at all. So I most use good old Kozaburo-Hair, and I really wonder why these old hairs are such top class products and no one of the vendors from today is abel to make hairs of same quality as Koz did many years ago?

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=3Dream

Hairs for closeup renders.

Quote - Dynamic hair is the best way to go for realism.

Dynamic hair does not fit to Poser renders. It looks like made with another software. Please do not find my opinion as a depreciating your work. Hair looks realistic, but does not fit to skin appearance.

I think this is main reason that hair room is not popular.

I'm thinking dynamic hair has much, much more going for it now that the speed it renders has improved as it has in PP2012. None of the examples here took more than 30 mins to render, the straighter cut hairs significantly less.

Dynamic hair has always appeared too coarse to me. Just a subjective opinion.

Carodan, those look better than most of the static hair props I've seen!!

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.

I agree with you on that 100%.  The way the hair in the above image plays with the light is just phenomenal, especially that you can see through to scalp, like with REAL hair, lol.  

You have a render in your gallery on Wix.com that has a girl with her hair tied back.  Is that dynamic hair, too?  

Yep. That one's in my gallery here too. It's a more distant shot done in P8 so although it was using coarser settings you don't notice it as easily. The strands down at the base of the neck look a little thick though.

I have just added it to my favorites, it'll be my go-to answer image in response to "no one can make dynamic hair look good in Poser.  Because that's b.s.  They just didn't try hard enough ;)

lol:) I re-visited dynamic hair with every release of Poser since version 5, and until P8 I just sighed and went back to prop hair. It's not surprising so many folk don't give it a second thought. It's just that now it's really worth it IMO.

What we need now is for someone who knows a little about the structure of real hair to embrace the hair room tools and make some knock-out styles. I'm heading in that direction myself but I have little time and even less appreciation of hairstyles (except the 'messy' kind).

Well, I definitely can't wait until PP2012 is in the budget :)  I've always wanted Dynamic Hair to be more than it was, and now it is, lol.

Carodan - your dynamic hair reders are best hair Poser which I ever seen. Did you used default hair node setting?

Carodan - on a completely unrelated topic - your model looks like a female Matt Smith, the current Doctor Who.

These are the settings I used on the renders in this thread, with slight variances in colour.

Very important: don't leave 'opaque in shadow' un-ticked. It slows the render down to a crawl in the scenes I've been testing.

I'm using IDL with an environment sphere to light my scene plus a couple of standard lights. No AO - use IDL for occlusion, it's cleaner in the tests I've done.

Quote - Carodan - on a completely unrelated topic - your model looks like a female Matt Smith, the current Doctor Who.

Ha! Yes, now I can't get it out of my head!

I'm just in the process of testing what I believe to as 'accurate' a head of hair as is possible (at least in one respect). I'm expecting it to be a long render!!

It is default Poser setting. I do not know how did you do it, but I never was able to render any figure where dynamic hair "cooperate" with skin. I always obtained effect similar to dadt. Moreover that was not only my problem. In Antonia thread more people tried to create dynamic hair for Antonia and had similar results.

I thought that Poser lights affect hair and skin different way. It might be true - I'm using P7 (no IDL) and as I rember most people did not used IDL.

Anyway congratulations :)

I think the real trick is in refining the hair. In Poser 9/PP2012 we can start thinking about it in terms of real strand counts and thicknesses. It sounds crazy to even attempt in Poser but the render speed has improved so much and the options are there to optimise the render settings that it is possible, and with half reasonable render times.

You have to get into the hair room and lower the root & Tip thicknesses on each hair group to around 0.15 or 0.2 (higher for hair groups that are mostly hidden). Then you need to dramatically raise the strand count for each group to ensure you have a full head of hair.

Carodan, thank you for showing those renders and the way you set up the hair shader. I need to play now.

You're welcome Nanette. I've been having fun testing with some of your hair pieces - nice.

Remember - it's not just the shaders but the strand thicknesses and count.

Something else: Gamma Correction (what was that groan?). But it is important, to prevent highlights from blowing out and shadows from burning the life out of the hair.

Not much help for P7 users, but important to mention. There's probably a way to GC in P7 using materials to modify the hair node.

I should also add that I'm using the 64-bit PP2012. which will be contributing heavily to the increased render speeds.

As the leading opponent of GC in P8, let me assure everyone that the implementation in P9/Pro 2012 is EXTREMELY user friendly. Don't be afraid of it!

And Carodan...

Your hair renders completely blow me away! You could sell those in the market place and there would be buyers right now!

Quote - As the leading opponent of GC in P8, let me assure everyone that the implementation in P9/Pro 2012 is EXTREMELY user friendly. Don't be afraid of it!

And Carodan...

Your hair renders completely blow me away! You could sell those in the market place and there would be buyers right now!

Thanks.

But these are all just my refinements of other people's freebie hair pieces, in the main tweaking the strand count and widths. I'm only just now getting aquainted with the process of making my own.

The only thing that's new is the render speed of PP2012.

So, I had to give it a try.

I'm informed by my top ten google results that the average brunette has appoximately 110000 hairs on their head. This is the first time that I personally have been able to get a render out with that kind of hair density.

Hair density 103079

Tip & Root widths 0.15

Render time 2 hours 39 seconds.

I used a hair piece (RDNA Colms 70's tacky perm) that had a single group for ease of adjustment. It's a little rough in places but I'm amazed it came out at all. I lowered my IDL render settings out of fear but I think it would still have rendered at the higher rate, only slower (might try that overnight).

So here it is, a dynamic hair render with an accurate(ish) strand density. Rock on PP2012!

That's totally awesome. I've been afraid of using DH due to slow rendering and just not really knowing what I was doing.

You mentioned that there's free dynamic hair out there? Would you mind pointing some out, maybe one for Miki3? :D

Most of the ones I've found usable are in the free stuff here (do a search for dynamic hair).

At the moment I'm happy to just play with these and use whatever works (whether they were intended for male or female etc).

What I do is use translation & scaling to roughly fit the hair to different figures and then make better fits to the skullcap using magnets. 

You want an ok fit but I've found that it doesn't have to be perfect at all. Usually takes me about 5 mins to get the skullcap with hair attached into a usable position.

There are styles that will require a much closer fit but I haven't explored those much yet.

Attached Link: RDNA thread with a post containing dynamic hair links

I'm working on Antonia WM's shaders, and whilst waiting for renders on the PP2012 system, I'm messing with Adorana's Shena Hair in the PP2010 hair room. I've adjusted her size down to Antonia's head with dial-spins. parented the skullcap to her head in Hierarchy editor.

in the hair room, looks like I'll have to adjust values for all growth groups... tip width/root width: no dramas. Hair density... there's a ...xxx next to the "Hair Density" label. If I type in 5000 into the input field next to the scroll wheel, I get 107804. Was that how it's meant to be done?

And no, not to be rendered on this lappie in PP2010: my lappie would curl up its toes and start smoking. I'm just setting up this hair to render on our new girl later on the desktop.

Wow, real hair on a real girl: what a coup-de-grace! :biggrin:

Yes, for hair density you're inputing a lower figure into the box provided and seeing how this affects the overall density.

In the case of Shena Hair you'd need to do the calculation over all the groups to arrive at the total hair density. Also it's worth considering that a physically accurate density is only going to yield good results if the structure of the hair is close to the distribution of strands on a real human scalp (I'm not sure if that's the case with Shena Hair). I used the 70's Tacky Hair for my test of a physically accurate density because the strands were distributed evenly over the entire scalp.

I wouldn't necessarily advise going for a physically accurate result straight off, and it's really a case of striking a balance between the hair density and the root/tip widths. For my tests that run under a half hour I was using 0.2 for both root and tip widths, and then scaling the density by a factor of 4 from what they were originally (if I remember correctly - I had messed with this previously so that may be way off). Trial and error.

I've only been getting these better times in PP2012 (64bit version). Not sure how P9 or the 32 bit version would cope. Dynamic hair was still very sluggish in PP2010

Just as a note of caution, I can't say whether any changes were made between PP2010 and PP2012 relating to hair density settings. It'd be worth checking the numbers on a setup made in 2010 and opened in 2012, just to be sure.

Good point! Oh, and so the ... is the total number on the head, supposedly. Might try for 50,000 and work my way up, just so my PC doesn't choke - 64 bit PP2012, but only 4 gig ram. :blink:

Quote - Good point! Oh, and so the ... is the total number on the head, supposedly. Might try for 50,000 and work my way up, just so my PC doesn't choke - 64 bit PP2012, but only 4 gig ram. :blink:

That number is the total per hair group, so you need to add up the numbers across all the groups attached to a skullcap.

There are 11 groups I think on Shena hair: Unten, HintenMitte, RechtsUnten etc. You need to increase the density of each of these so that together they add up to your total desired density.

I don't know why they have one number that represents another like this. It's pretty confusing.

One thing I've always wanted to try with dynamic hair (but don't have the modeling skills for): a skullcap that is higher-res along the front, and maybe along the part, if there is one.  That way, the hair could be thicker where the roots are visible, without having to make the entire skullcap high-res.

Carodan!

There she is again- the most realistic poser lady! Could you please post a screen shot of your hair settings. I'm already a convert to your version of SSS skin! I tried dynamic hair with Ppro2010 and it just took too long to render. Now with 2012 I'm eager to revisit this.

Quote - 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.

Hi Eric

I have to say that the SSS skin shaders I use are the ones posted by BB over at RDNA so I can't really accept any credit for those (well, maybe some minor tweaks). They are good though arn't they!

I think I should really start a new thread going through this methodically - I've kinda hijacked three threads now here & at RDNA with this dynamic hair refinement.

There's not a one-size-fits-all explanation. All the dynamic hair setups I've adapted like this have been different in one way or another, although the concept is straightforward enough.

Maybe I sould pick a freebie hair piece and go through the process as a mini tut. I wish Adoradas Shena hair was still avalable because that's one of the nicest I've used so far - it shows in freestuff but the site it links to no longer has it. If anyone knows a location where it can still be found it's be very useful.

I'm quite busy over the next few days but I'll try to put something together next week.

Maybe I missed it and it was said already, but I would also recommend to increase the verts per hair value to get smoother bends especially for the parting. In my example here I forgot that...thats Triora hair from Adorana btw.

Carodan: Thank you for your tips. Do you know if the root and tip width values are influenced by the units selected in the General Preferences dialog?

Render time 7min (SSS and IDL).

Nice renders facehugger.

I hadn't mentioned the verts per hair yet but yes, you can increase these where needed.

The root & tip widths don't seem affected by different units, but hair density is for some reason. This seems an arbitrary figure anyway (although I could be wrong). The input figure changes from e.g. 250 to 36000 when I change from inches to feet, but the hair density remains the same.

I have my units set to inches in any case.

Quote - One thing I've always wanted to try with dynamic hair (but don't have the modeling skills for): a skullcap that is higher-res along the front, and maybe along the part, if there is one.  That way, the hair could be thicker where the roots are visible, without having to make the entire skullcap high-res.

I haven't looked into the implications of mesh resolution on dynamic hair construction at all yet. Most of the examples I've been playing with have a relatively low poly count, evenly spread across the skullcap.

I was just searching around for more info on dynamic hair and found this very nice example by vincebagna.

It was meant for the Poser 5/6 era, or thereabouts, and worked really well for animation.  I did end up using a painted skullcap with it for closeups, though. 

I really like that hair, and still use it, but it doesn't work as well in Poser 9.  Both collisions and rendering are buggy, probably due to memory issues.  I've got 12 Gb of RAM, but apparently, that's not enough with Poser 9.  (Genesis Hair used to work beautifully with 1.5 Gb of RAM in Poser 5.)

I wish someone would make dynamic hair skullcaps.  The skullcaps available for prop hair are too high-res.  I'd like lower-res skullcaps, with high-quality textures (like 3Dream's universal skullcaps, only without that many polys).  Maybe different resolutions for different uses (animation vs. closeups).  And, like I said, with more polys along the hairline.

I use PhilC's hair designer to ceate a fitted skullcap. Then I take it into Blender and edit the hairline. I usually need to cut away a few rows of polys from the forehead.  I also group it in Blender, though you can do that in Poser. I like to subdivide the polys around the hairline and along the parting, usually around double density, it depends on how I intend the hair to fall eventually. I use centimeters for my Poser units so it is difficult to compare density figures, I am not sure how they work anyway. For me it is still trial and error. I have found that if the hair is too dense, it starts to look like plastic.

I don't like the hair exactly the same colour all over, so I often plug in a texture or a shader node to create some variation. The wood node is surprisingly useful to make highlights. Granite works. Or you can use a stone or fur texture. I used to use Adorana's hair colours a lot but now I prefer to play around and make my own.

Actually, the roots on someones head are darker than the tips. The hair on top of the head is lighter than the hair underneath it. That what i did in the posts above. 

If you use IDL and opaque on, the highlights will be generated for you, so not really a wood node necessary.

lover3d -  those look nice. Did you make them yourself?

facehugger - can't be a bad idea. I'm just starting to experiment with the differences between high & low poly skullcaps, specifically how the resulting hair structure looks when run in dynamic simulation and then rendered at high resolutions.

I'd love to hear any and all thoughts about experiments and approaches people may have used in creating DH. It's all new to me.