Carodan, the first one is kates hair piece. the second one, is the dynamic hair piece of Jessi. I changed it a bit, yanked up the hairs and also the vert count( between 45-80) and used on the roots a dark brown, and a much lighter one( in the same color scheme) on the tips. For the hair on the top i used a lighter brown than the hair underneath it. It works great with blonde hair too.

For rendering i used IDL with an HDRI light, just 2 simple lights thats all. Ive set the idl to 8. You can set it higher, but the calculating will take much longer then with almost same results. It's not the rendering that takes a long time at all, its only the calculation of the idl on the hair.

Miki looks good with a bob.

Quote - Carodan, the first one is kates hair piece. the second one, is the dynamic hair piece of Jessi. I changed it a bit, yanked up the hairs and also the vert count( between 45-80) and used on the roots a dark brown, and a much lighter one( in the same color scheme) on the tips. For the hair on the top i used a lighter brown than the hair underneath it. It works great with blonde hair too.

runs off and installs Poser Pro 2012 hair

Thank you!

The supplied hair pieces arent that bad, only the settings and the shader is wrong thats all.

facehugger

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This should also work in pp2010:) only a bit slower, i tested it already and looks good too.

My memory's getting bad. I've used both those hair pieces and still I didn't recognise them.

What I'm also quite keen to get to grips with are the dynamic settings - how to set them up so as not to lose all the styling in a hair piece but still get some variation in draping for different poses. The defaults seem to mess most styles up.

Also, can you use dynamics to set up a style? I was playing with a simple setup for very long hair and got a nice drape using dynamics but as soon as I changed any other settings the dynamics were lost. I really have a lot to learn here.

If you want to change the hair a bit, dont use the dials but use the hair tool icon, select the hair part you want, click on the hair tool item, use twist or curl or something else, and you also see root and tip, you can change teh slider to where you want for instance the curls, and a bit lower you see a slider with length. you can grow the hair there, without losing the style. Works much better.

And yes you can drape it also a bit. I nice trick is to use a pose on frame 1 and a different pose on frame 30, then calculate the hair dynamics. Then slide from frame 1 till a frame where you like the hair ( for instance if she bends a bit over the hair should be in her face more) if you like it then hit render and you have a nice dynamic hair wich follows all the poses, in animation but also in still images.

 I made a very bright light and now you can see for yourself very well the hair contains lowlights and highlights just like in real life.

I've done a similar trick here for a different effect, to give the hair a mix of grey hairs. You can plug all kinds of procedural or image map nodes into the hair node to vary colour, create streaks etc.

There were some good threads a year or so ago detailing some of these variations.

I'm not sure the hair room is supposed to be used quite like this as the strands do crazy stuff during simulation and arn't very controllable, but I really like how it creates a frizzy look in the final render without using kink settings which can tend to look a little uniform.

The hi res skullcap seems to lean toward a slightly more naturalistic hair for some reason - not great for dynamics or animation though (the simulation took ages).

carodan! Oh wow! That looks more realistic. I mean when does people ever have a good hair day (except in fantasy, TV shows or movies). Could you please do a tut on hair room settings. I've tried almost every tut but could never get it to be as good as the ones shown here.  Pretty please!!!

Actuallly, what would be really useful would be to have the option of driving hair length using image maps. I'm assuming we can't already do this.

Hi Thunderstone - I'm definitely going to do a mini-tut on adapting and refining existing hairs, including some of the hair room settings.This isn't going to happen quickly though as I'm very busy this week and really shouldn't even be online right now. As soon as I can.

As for creating new hair, it's all new to me. I'm just playing at the moment and learning from other peoples tuts. There's a lot to take in.

Please bear with me, English is not my first language, and my true meaning may be getting lost in translation.

Lover3d, sorry I don't see the highlights you are talking about, or for me that is not what I mean by highlights. If you mean that bright, desaturated area that looks as if it is a semi-transparent object lying on top of the hair obscuring the strand detail, that is not what I want to achieve in my renders, that is what I want to avoid.  The streaked look that Carodan shows is closer to what I am after, and I think he exaggerated the effect in order to demonstrate - what I want is more subtle. I would really like to be able to have hair that appears naturally shiny, but doesn't look like a flat polished surface. I think the specular colour needs to be somehow modulated.

Carodan, I really like that "successful failure of yours", I don't think it is a failure at all. I would love to know how you achieved the combination of relatively straight hair with slight frizz - it looks very natural. The hairline also looks very convincing. I always have a problem with the hairline looking too obvious.

no the white thing is cuz of the light that is wrong setting of the light, its only a test render, you see the white patch is cuz i didnt block it from teh render with a mask, due to HDRI lightning thats all. 

Quote - Carodan, I really like that "successful failure of yours", I don't think it is a failure at all. I would love to know how you achieved the combination of relatively straight hair with slight frizz - it looks very natural. The hairline also looks very convincing. I always have a problem with the hairline looking too obvious.

 

Thanks Nanette.

What I did was really simple. I used a high res skullcap and grew a single group of guide hairs with 60 verts per hair, which I pulled fully back and also down a little. I also selected each half of the group and slightly parted them for a very rough centre parting.

I used a transition between two poses on the animation time-line, starting with the head looking up and ending with the final pose you see in the render. I then ran the dynamic simulation, setting bend resistance quite low, spring strength & position and root stiffness to zero. The simulation took hours (with collisions on) while I was out so it isn't a very practical technique. you also can't then go back and do any more styling or you lose the dynamic draping.

I think the higher res skullcap has something to do with the final effect, contributing to the sheer density and randomness of the resulting strand positions.

It would be nice if one could "freeze" the positions of the dynamically draped hair. Personally I have had better results with medium to high resolution skullcaps, and with higher resolutions around the parting and hairline. It is easy enough to customise the skullcap for the style.

I think "highlight" is the right word, Nanette.  Here in the US, women (and some men) often pay a lot of money to have their hair "highlighted."  That means coloring small sections of the hair to give a more natural look, add depth, etc.  It has nothing to do with lighting.

In real life, most people don't have every strand of hair the same color.

Randym77: Getting to the age where nature does the "highlighting" for me (albeit in a nasty dishwater shade), I am only too aware of that!

Attached Link: V42Skullcap LowRes

Thanks facehugger.

I don't suppose I can be cheeky & ask if there's any chance of getting you to sub-divide this for a medium & a high res version?

Facehugger - did you uv map the skullcap? It's useful for using textures to drive hair effects.

I just updated the ZIP with a mid res and high res version. These are not yet UV mapped. The link is the same...

Attached Link: V42SkullcapsUV

In the Runtime structure you'll find 3 UV-mapped Skullcaps (Low, Mid, High Resolution) in PropsV42Skullcaps. Can someone please check if the mapping is alright??? How can the texture influence the hair color?

Did I mention I hate UV mapping with Hexagon? :blink: I will check if I can improve it. If someone wants to help, you're welcome....

facehugger, have you tried using UVmapper. It's free and can be found here

Quote - Another try with another haircut. I used less verts count this time, because the hair is longer and thicker. It is better to yank up the verts count( its around 50 in this one),to get it a bit smoother.

very cool!

gives me hope that well actually be able to get decent results with the hair room :)

regarding transmapped hair:  the declining quality is likely a result of the massive oversaturation of hair products in the MP.  the last transmapped hair to actually impress me was the Sapphire Fox hair by Quarker.

Quote - It would be nice if one could "freeze" the positions of the dynamically draped hair.

This should be possible, using Python.  Python has no problem positioning the hairs, so a script could read the worldspace vertex information and bake that into the geometry.  I do something similar with a script for the clothroom, converting the dynamic cloth deformations into a series of morphs.

The attached script worked in my quick test, to bake the dynamics into a dynamic hair prop.  It should also work to bake deformations into any other actor.

The script works on the currently selected actor, and will embed a geomCustom reference into that actor.  The script isn't compensating for parenting when it handles worldvertex positions, so it will work best if the skull cap to which the hair prop is attached is in its default position.

The script can also be used to bake a morphed shape into a skullcap if, for instance, you've had to shape the skullcap for a character morph which affects the scalp.  In such a case, I've found that the guide hairs still want to appear at the un-morphed locations of the skull cap vertices, in which case baking the morphs into the cap can be useful.

"the last transmapped hair to actually impress me was the Sapphire Fox hair by Quarker."

actually i take that back, this is pretty damned cool:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/alanis-hair/86047

Cage - Cool script, I was just trying it out. I assume I'm not able to edit the growth controls after using it though - it re-set the hair when I did a moment ago.

btw, thanks for those skullcaps facehugger.

Quote - Cage - Cool script, I was just trying it out. I assume I'm not able to edit the growth controls after using it though - it re-set the hair when I did a moment ago.

Which tools were you using?  I think the Grow Guide Hairs tools will always break any existing styling, but the tools (oh, those dreaded tools! :lol:) on the Hair Style Tool palette can be used without problems.  The Styling Controls settings can also be altered.

Cage, thank you ever so much for that script!

You may be able to deform or shape the hairs with magnets or the Morphing Tool, then bake the shape using the script.  I'm not sure how well that would work, since the hair vertices could end up with wildly uneven spacing along the hair.  But it should be possible.  :unsure:

I hope I haven't killed your thread. 

I wanted to note that I've tested a working process for editing Poser dynamic hair in an external application.

• Export the guide hairs.  Poser is able to export line .obj files.
• Edit the hair in a 3D modeler which supports line geometries.  I was able to test this using Blender 2.48.  Blender 2.60 no longer seems to support line .obj import, out of the box, although there may be an add-on script for that.
• While editing, do not move the root vertices for the hairs.
• Export the shaped guide hairs.
• Load the new shape as a morph target on the original hair prop in Poser.
• Set the morph to 1.0 and bake the morph into the geometry, using the bake script.

That process seems to work.  Unfortunately, Blender's toolset doesn't make the process much easier, so I've only performed a proof-of-concept test and don't have any results to show.  Other programs may offer more flexible tools for handling imported line geometries.

FaceHugger, Carodan, and all-

Thanks! I am going to revisit dynamic hair and join the thread

what is it about poser hair that always makes it look way too shiny - like its made of plastic. any way to tone down the specularity a bit?

That is toned down from the default.  I could go further with it.  I think part of the problem is that the hair color is plugged into the alternate diffuse chanel, which makes it hyper bright in the first place.  Just a guess though

it might not even be about the highlights, but rather how 'un-diffused' they are.

dont get me wrong you guys are getting awesome results with poser hair. but there is still a distinct 'poser hair' look to it.

maybe it just needs some sortof blur and a way to diffuse the highlights a bit.

it seems to me that poser dynamic hair highlights look like they are trying to emulate THIS, no matter what hair/hair color you use.

but the only time hair highlights look like this is when some fake blonde hollywood actress just stepped out of the makeup studio, and it looks just as jarringly unrealistic in poser as it does on a real person.

just trying to help.

its an improvement on the first.

it still seems to be a wee bit glowy and low-contrast - it may be your gamma settings or lighting. or a complete lack of hair highlights?

http://shortlonghairstyles.com/images/2009/06/Mila-Kunis-hairstyle-for-round-face1.jpg

http://0.tqn.com/d/beauty/1/0/Z/p/82169515.jpg

http://s.tidebuy.com/images/product/1/1714/1714992_1.jpg

http://0.tqn.com/d/beauty/1/0/t/x/Leighton_Meester.jpg

i would possibly suggest starting with a brunette base, and once you have that looking right then modify it into a redhead. getting a proper redhead look is tricky and might be easier once you have all the other variables worked out.

Well, down the road.  For me, it's rig first, texture later.  I need to run some more experiments to see if I'm creating too much work for myself by having too many hair groups.