I thought the soft decorated group was just supposed to follow the dynamics, and that the dynamics would not try to interact with the soft decorated group? Even though it looks like it is, in this scenario. It even happens if I just run a drape.

Has anyone ran into anything similar?

Meanwhile I am going to explore different venues of multiple dynamic layers.

I'm just thinking.  If you have no self-collisions on, and soft decorated pieces follow the cloth underneath it, could the soft decorations get confused by other pieces of cloth?

Hmm, just tried that. With just one piece with decorated hairs, and nothing else. Self collision on/off. Same thing happens.  In the simulation it looks like the soft decorated group starts shifting a bit, then the dynamic group tries to follow it, and the decorated tries to follow that etc.  If I set a really long simulation time, the hair has pretty much wrapped itself into a crazy mess of knots.

I've seen soft decorated groups go out of sync before, like falling through the clothing and not matching, but this.. this is just weird. Right on par with the eyebrow thing!

The attached picture shows what happens after simulating for 300 frames. It doesn't stop moving, but just keep rolling itself up more and more

No, that wouldn't necessarily be the solution to what I'm talking about, .  I'm not saying put self-collisions on.  I'm just saying that soft decoration follows whatever cloth is underneath it.  I don't know if it only follows the cloth that its next to when the sim starts or it follows whatever cloth its next to while simming.  If it's the latter, and the cloth underneath it gets tangled, it might cause the soft decorations to get confused.  No collisions would mean the cloth would overlap, which might cause the soft decorated groups to behave strangely.

That isn't to say that turning on self-collision would necesssarily stop overlapping.  I'm just saying that without self-collision it will almost definitely overlap, which might cause problems ofr the soft decorations. 

I have no clue what the solution to that would be, but I'd test first to find out.  Which I'd probably do by testing one set of layers. Basically, I'd separate the problem into layers and strands rather than both at once, just to narrow down the problem.

Now, if I make the distance greater anywhere else, not close to a edge, the whole thing works just fine. It doesn't seem to get problematic later on in the sim either, even if layers overlap and such. As long as it "connects" right at the beginning of the sim, it works fine later.

Unless there's a workaround for this, the only way to do decorated strips is to keep them close enough to the underlying fabric, and if waves are needed, make sure the edges don't lift up too much.. Could always make it curl out towards the bottom, then connect back again, closer, and use trans maps. It's a bit more complicated, but would probably work.

Very interesting, as well as frustrating.  That rather explains part of an experience I had with a dynamic necklace lately.

You don't care about self-collision, right?  Then you can do waves in your displacement.   If you have nice simple flat mapping, like most hair, you can even make your waves procedural.  If you've given your strips several maps (7 or so seems to be the norm), you can even offset them a little so that you automatically have waves that are a bit individual to each strip.  I'm sure there's a way to get the waves to vary in size randomly. 

If you want, if you send me this latest version, I could take a whack at it.  I'm pretty good at materials in general, and I've spent a lot of time on hair.  I've been using my own hair materials and my own diffuse hair texture (blonde- I just adjust that one texture to get the color I want) for several years now.  My latest hair idea involves SSS and (optionally) reflection.  Soft reflections with Fresnel can really help a lot, if the hair mesh is simple enough to render transmapped reflections without taking a millenium.

Quote - Very interesting, as well as frustrating.  That rather explains part of an experience I had with a dynamic necklace lately.

You don't care about self-collision, right?  Then you can do waves in your displacement.   If you have nice simple flat mapping, like most hair, you can even make your waves procedural.  If you've given your strips several maps (7 or so seems to be the norm), you can even offset them a little so that you automatically have waves that are a bit individual to each strip.  I'm sure there's a way to get the waves to vary in size randomly. 

If you want, if you send me this latest version, I could take a whack at it.  I'm pretty good at materials in general, and I've spent a lot of time on hair.  I've been using my own hair materials and my own diffuse hair texture (blonde- I just adjust that one texture to get the color I want) for several years now.  My latest hair idea involves SSS and (optionally) reflection.  Soft reflections with Fresnel can really help a lot, if the hair mesh is simple enough to render transmapped reflections without taking a millenium.

By correcting the bottom of the soft strips, they are starting to behave better, one by one!  Funny that you are talking about displacements, I was thinking too of adding some of that to the top layer.  My texture is currently made with waves, including the trans map. If you give me a day or two to get this part wrapped up and cleaned up, I'll send you the hair!

I'd love to see what you can do with it, and how you think. Especially if I get a chance to learn more about materials in the process.

So instead I am going completely with multiple cloth objects, that I can collide with one another (Or not, I am testing which works best)  Initial tests with displacements are going well. Although multiple layers will go through each other when I make waves. An alternative is to only let the top layers have the waves. Initial tests have shown that using displacement waves only for top layers seems to work best.

Another tricky area is the parting, near the forehead, getting that one to look good.

The hair texture and trans map needs some work too. It's my first hair model, so it's taking some work to get it right. But bit by bit I think we're getting somewhere!

Another thing I'd like to do is to make an extra layer that has loose "fly" strands, using displacements, to get a bit of that wild, dynamic look.

Currently I have 4 layers. They each begin lower and the top one start from the parting. That way it will actually appear thick when the head is turned rather than look like it all comes from the parting. This means 4 simulations in the cloth room. And a 5th if I use flying strands, too.

It's not as bad as it seams. Using hex triangles, the simulations go really, really fast even when each layer uses 9-12k polys.

I think it looks great.  I think this is just perfect for what polygon hair should do.  I'd love to learn more about how you made this.  My own thoughts about dynamic cloth hair have been more towards trying to figure out how to make cloth work like a soft body, like in a video I've seen of Hatsune Miku.  I didn't think I could get layers to work.  But you've done an excellent job here.  I'd love to see it in motion or upside down.  It seems exactly like what I'd love to use.

WOw!  I have to say that does look pretty amazing.  great work.

Glad you like it! Having a very busy week, so it's moving slowly. But I'm currently reworking the trans maps, and will then figure out the displacements and stray hair layer. I have absolutely no experience with hair shaders though, so I'll take any help I can get there.

I have a recent post with a decent quickie hair material.  If you don't use the reflection in it, you can use a broad specular node instead.  Just to say, I don't usually color my HSV nodes like that, and most of my materials have conservation of energy and other features built into them (and are scripted, for that matter).  I also use the Custom_Scatter node a bit differently in general.  But very dark hair can be a bit more work.  Anyway, I can send you that material if you're interested. 

I also have other example renders of my hair materials, if you're interested.  I usually postwork my hair, so you might want to see the originals.

I'd love to see some of the renders of your materials! It would be nice to distribute this hair with some sort of shader. I gather that a shine/specular map should be made for that, too, or?

Quote - I'd love to see some of the renders of your materials! It would be nice to distribute this hair with some sort of shader. I gather that a shine/specular map should be made for that, too, or?

No problem!  I'll gather some together soon.

It depends on what you mean by that.  Hair isn't generally shiny in some places and not in others.  A map controlling specular value specifies exactly that, even though it's generally and completely inaccurately based on diffuse maps and has all sorts of surface detail where there's no difference in shininess of a material at all.  Highlights in hair are should be placed based on the shape of the mesh and the placement of the lights. 

I use textures to tint the color of the highlights, because they look more accurate with a bit of tint.  Technically, that shouldn't be necessary and SSS should take care of softening and spreading highlights.  In practice, I still find it helpful. 

Quote - No problem!  I'll gather some together soon.

It depends on what you mean by that.  Hair isn't generally shiny in some places and not in others.  A map controlling specular value specifies exactly that, even though it's generally and completely inaccurately based on diffuse maps and has all sorts of surface detail where there's no difference in shininess of a material at all.  Highlights in hair are should be placed based on the shape of the mesh and the placement of the lights. 

I use textures to tint the color of the highlights, because they look more accurate with a bit of tint.  Technically, that shouldn't be necessary and SSS should take care of softening and spreading highlights.  In practice, I still find it helpful. 

Huh, didn't realize it worked like that. Well, that's pretty good and saves the bother to make specular maps. Shinyness can really differ in different hairs too, at least from what I get from reference pictures. Anything from matted barbarian hair to a conditioner commercial... I've used the material room mostly for clothing, and for altering existing hairs and skins to get the results I want.

Those are some really nice highlights!

Those look great too!

If it's alright with you, I'll play around with the materials in that post you linked to get a good starting material for the hair?

Quote - Shinyness can really differ in different hairs too, at least from what I get from reference pictures. Anything from matted barbarian hair to a conditioner commercial... I've used the material room mostly for clothing, and for altering existing hairs and skins to get the results I want.

Oh, definitely.  It's just that you don't generally need to do finer control than to set the shininess for a particular hair material you're working on.  If you have really poofy hair that's pulled back, the pulled back part might be shinier than the poof.  But that's about the only time you'd have different.

I've done quite a lot of work with materials and lights.  I've scripted my main material library (which I sell here) with Matmatic.  That simple hair material I posted to my gallery is me just playing around and experimenting, so that I made by hand.  When I have the basic properties and relationships  in place, I turn it into a script and put all the features it should have into place, in addition to separating out the key parameters.

Quote - Those look great too!

If it's alright with you, I'll play around with the materials in that post you linked to get a good starting material for the hair?

Oh, sure!  You just might want to replace the Reflection node with a Specular node.  The reflection works because that's an older hair by Kozaburo, so it has a great shape and few layers.  Lots of layers and pieces make reflection take way too long.

Oh!  And the one thing that is useful in terms of controlling specular value on hair is the the trans map.  You don't want shine where there's not supposed to be mesh.

Quote - Oh!  And the one thing that is useful in terms of controlling specular value on hair is the the trans map.  You don't want shine where there's not supposed to be mesh.

Ugh, yeah that would not be pretty!

1. All the layers, even though the lower ones start further down on the head, tends to simulate at very similar places, so the hair gets thinner than I want. It would be nice if the innermost layer would actually look like it's closer to the head/shoulder..  I don't know what settings that could solve that in the cloth room, or if I should model the inner layers a bit differently?

2. The second thing is that get sharp shadows and "stringy" looking bits, Do the trans maps need to be stronger, or am I missing something else? If I ad some shine, it gets worse.

It's getting close now, just need to figure out these more subtle issues to really get the final touch!

1. My guess is that you should model it a bit differently, and make sure its got an appropriate density.  Though, really, I'm unclear about how the physics of what you're looking for would work.  This is where I'd start using reference images that specifically matched poses and hair styles to test the simulation settings.

2.  Sharp shadows are generally a lighting issue.  What are you lights like?  I'm not sure about your trans maps, because how fine they get is so much a personal perspective on how many fine strands you should see.  That said, I've found my worst problem with trans maps has been making them too fine and painting them like I do hair.  Most trans maps I've studied have been fairly thick.  The ones that haven't been have needed me to render with the right combination of low shading rate and texture filtering.

Yeah I need to rethink a few things with the layers and see what happens. One thing that could make them different, would be to roll and rotate the big strips a bit, that would alter their drape. We'll see!

There are probably other improvements that can be done too, especially to trans maps and displacements. It's the first hair I've ever done, so there's a ton to learn, I'm sure. I am going to set up the props, a decent readme and a couple of textures/colors and hopefully put it up on freestuff by the end of this weekend.

I don't have a good shine yet, so I won't include that, but I'd love to see what kind of modifications and improvents other people could make with it!

For making stills, it's probably a good idea to do some post work, as someone mentioned. Are there any good guides or tutorials on how to do postwork on hair? I'd love to see that. :)

This picture below shows the dynamic hair over the figure I have been testing with. She is much more full figured than V4 with standard morphs. She uses custom breast morphs (NGM and NBM), plus a loose, dynamic shirt. The hair drapes flawlessly over both the figure and the clothing. I really want to see more of this stuff. I would definitely pay for good dynamic cloth hairs, myself. :)

I think I'll probably add an optional forehead bangs prop to this hair, then I am going to move on and see if I can make a pony tail.

Alright, the hair is uploaded!  When it's approved, I think I'll start a new thread where we can discuss dynamic cloth hairs in general rather than the particular problem that started this thread!

Yay!  I can't wait to try out the finished product! 

Been lurking for a while, looking forward to it.

I've also been lurking and will see how it works in animations.

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