Please make a left part and a right part version of your hair if it's parted off-center.

Thank you.

And a mirrored version if it's assymetric. 

Amen!

And provide a HR2 version for those of us who don't use the latest Vicky or Genny or whoever is the latest. 

And show us how it looks in Preview mode so those of us who like to run quick animations can tell if it's going to be suitable.  

Quote - And a mirrored version if it's assymetric. 

Exactly what I meant, better said.

I'm with ockham... I dispise Figure hair. The disadvantages SO outweigh any perceived advantage! Rather than make the hiar a figure, fitted to a single character, put that work into morphs for the hr2. It makes for a much more flexible, useful product.

I just downloaded a 21 MB hair. Yes, a twenty - one MB hair.

For a 8.000 poly figure.

Then I ask myself?
Who is doing the better job???????

It took 16 minutes to render the hair and 14 seconds for the rest of a fully clothed figure in a scene with props.

PS; it did not even look good either.
So, after a very quick push on the "Del" button, I will not suffer twice.

Please next time include poly count and file size.
Thank you.

I recently downloaded a hair figure of around 57mb, the read me included render setting advice for the hair, and tbh, the recommended render settings wouldnt cut mustard with the demands of the majority of todays Poser users. Is this another example of "if you like it buy it, but don't ask me to change" ,economics?

And while we are at it.

Why do vendors make shoes as figures?

Quote - I recently downloaded a hair figure of around 57mb, the read me included render setting advice for the hair, and tbh, the recommended render settings wouldnt cut mustard with the demands of the majority of todays Poser users. Is this another example of "if you like it buy it, but don't ask me to change" ,economics?

No, your example is the "I am an Artist, I only make what I am personally interested in." thought process.

What Vilters said. Can't count the hours I spent manually deleting vertices from hair strands in Wings. Most often I could reduce polycount by up to 70% without any reduction in render quality whatsoever.

I'd like to see more realistic everyday hair instead of over the top fantasy stuff.

More period hair. Would love to have some "Belle Epoque" hair and some quality 80's big hair.

More useful morphs like "running" and "upside down" instead of a gazillion of ridiculous looking "styling" morphs.

Would pay double, nah, triple for some simple mid-parted long hair with a truly realistic upside-down morph.

In general, I'd like to see more realism. Transmapped hair can look very convincing if it's shaped correctly.

Most Poser hairs have good geometry, excellent textures and shaders, but really strange shapes.

BTW, it's quite easy to mirror a hair in a modeller. I think there are even python scripts out there to do that inside Poser.

Sometimes rigging is necessary, e.g. with braids, but even then I rather just parent the hair figure to the head instead of conforming.

Quote - And while we are at it.

Why do vendors make shoes as figures?

 

Does the front part of the foot or the ankle need to bend?  I suppose you can get away with it if you have morphs and magnets, but for the ease of the beginner end user, I can see why it is done that way.

And when making promo images for hair, please include a clear shot of the back. A lot of hair products seem to show every single color it comes in (including all the greens and purples) viewed from the front, but you are left guessing what the back looks like.

Quote - More period hair. Would love to have some "Belle Epoque" hair ...

Oh yes, I'd love to see a good 'Gibson Girl' floppy updo, I've even started work on one myself a few times but I always seem to end up with a sort of streaky cowpat/beret thing, not the sort of thing you'd want to put on a pretty head at all.

JoePublic did you make the twin ponytails hair?  I'd love to have/buy it :)

I also think the backs of hair should be shown please.  And less puffiness in the styles so they could be used for children as well.

I'm really wishing I could find a single suggestion in this to disagree with... but I'm on board with every word!

@masha: The twin Ponytails are DAZ' Geve hair: 

http://www.daz3d.com/geve-hair

I just made some new morphs for the tail movement.

This is one for the books.

We all agree on something. :-)

Happy Posering
Tony.

Dang, Tony... Isn't that one of the signs of the second coming??????

Quote - Dang, Tony... Isn't that one of the signs of the second coming??????

I believe so ;)

Yeah... upside down morphs, and other proper action-related movement morphs... I'd love to see more of that sort of thing too...

I have to also agree here. I hate conforming hair. I'll use it if the hair style is one I like, but I most often prefer a hr2 version which I can resize easier to any character or put on a male. I suppose it would be way to complicated to come up with a python script to convert conforming hair to a hr2 right?

Quote - I have to also agree here. I hate conforming hair. I'll use it if the hair style is one I like, but I most often prefer a hr2 version which I can resize easier to any character or put on a male. I suppose it would be way to complicated to come up with a python script to convert conforming hair to a hr2 right?

Ever try just loading a conforming hair and not comforming it... rather parenting it to the head? This is how I tend to use them.

I agree wholeheartedly on needing more promo images showing the back and sides.  I don't need a front-on image of every colour of the rainbow.  If I can't see what it's going to look like from the side and the back, I'm most likely not going to take a risk and buy it.

There's already at least a couple of figure to prop conversion scripts I know of...

e.g.

You can do it with Wardrobe Wizard or there's a D3D script...

http://d3d.sesseler.de/index.php?software=poserpython&product=figure2prop

What further steps would be needed to convert to an hr2?

Re:Conforming hair:

1: Load your figure

2: Load the hair figure (DO NOT CONFORM)

3: Scale and move the BODY of the hair figure until it fits your figure.

4.PARENT the hair figure to your figure's head.

OR:

Do steps 1 to 3 as above.

Save the textures of your hair figure as a material file.

Export hair figure as an object file.

Delete hair figure.

Import the hair object.

Load textures with the material file.

Parent hair object to head.

Save hair in hair folder.

Hooray, your hair figure is now a .hr2 file.

But:

Hair mat poses likely need to be converted to material files.

All morphs are gone unless you re-add them manually.

(But I think there might be python scripts to solve both problems)

Aaah, I was too slow. :-(

So I guess Using Wardrobe Wizard to convert to prop, retaining the morphs... which I think it does(?) ...combined with Joe's second option, might do it?

Will have to do that for all the figure hair I currently have, if so...

Also, I'm pretty sure I've got some hr2 hair that came with mat poses. I think mat poses do work with props too.. or can do?

EDIT: Yeah, the AprilYSH hr2 hairs I have, have both fit pose files and mat pose files...

Quote - And provide a HR2 version for those of us who don't use the latest Vicky or Genny or whoever is the latest. 

And show us how it looks in Preview mode so those of us who like to run quick animations can tell if it's going to be suitable.  

Goodness yes. Having HR2 versions, I totally agree! I use all kinds of figures and have run into the same need. It would save me from having create one myself from the CR2 version.

;-( Do not parent long hair to the head. :-(

Parent long hair to the NECK with "inherit bends from parent" checked ON............

It will follow all head, neck, and collar movements. ;-) ;-) ;-)

I too agree about prop hair, much prefered by this Poser user...

Joepublic's suggestions are spot on. Good thread.

Maybe you should try dynamic hair. You don't need movement morphs. Its all hr2 also. 

Joepublic, for long middle parted hair try http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=70572. But while it should work I haven't tried it upside down you can have it for half off.   

Thanks, I tried yours, but except for animal fur and perhaps grass, I don't use dynamic hair.

To my eyes it just doesn't realistic enough yet for human hair.

No, it has to be transmapped like the one in this render.

Quote - I have to also agree here. I hate conforming hair. I'll use it if the hair style is one I like, but I most often prefer a hr2 version which I can resize easier to any character or put on a male. I suppose it would be way to complicated to come up with a python script to convert conforming hair to a hr2 right?

Netherworks has the Hair Control System.  The latest version is here:

http://www.runtimedna.com/Hair-Conversion-System-2012-core.html

What Poser needs is good dynamic hair. I second JoePublic that Poser's current dynamic hair makes suitable fur, but I've yet to see it look good as hair. Poser's dynamic hair is terribly, terribly dated--I really think that an overhaul should be a priority for Poser 10.

Fantasy Hair Room:

You enter hair room and hair splines are automatically placed on pre-defined scalp area which every figure would come equipped with.  The Hair is at a mid length and shooting straight out in all directions, as if no gravity, much like it currently does.

A few logical numerical 1-100 settings (Note:  not different systems different scales different numbers, but all percentage based) named sensibly and you hit a real-time simulation button, and the hair falls based on the settings.  Now, in real time, you can adjust these settings and see, IRT, the effects.

Gravity is it's own setting, And multiple wind systems can also be in place to direct the fall of hair in real time.

When you have something you like, stop the sim.  If you make the hair splines fatter, the texture map acts accordingly by adding more texture/Trans from the source map, which could very easily be a universal vertical map of hair.

Quote - What Poser needs is good dynamic hair. I second JoePublic that Poser's current dynamic hair makes suitable fur, but I've yet to see it look good as hair. Poser's dynamic hair is terribly, terribly dated--I really think that an overhaul should be a priority for Poser 10.

Yeah, fair enough.

Having been playing around with the fibre mesh hair in ZBrush, I'd definitely like to see something more like this, native in Poser.

Personally, I guess I've got the fibre mesh generation capabilities in ZBrush to play with now...

...but still. I don't see why something similar couldn't be realised natively in Poser? ;)

Quote - What Poser needs is good dynamic hair. I second JoePublic that Poser's current dynamic hair makes suitable fur, but I've yet to see it look good as hair.

Wow, can't agree with that. I will agree that dynamic hair needs to have the right material settings in order to look good—but once you've got that, it has twice the potential for realism as even the best transmapped hair (which I've pretty much given up on).

Quote - Poser's dynamic hair is terribly, terribly dated--I really think that an overhaul should be a priority for Poser 10.

There I can definitely agree. While I've tweaked materials to where I'm quite satisfied... I'm nowhere near satisfied with my ability to style dynamic hair. It's far too difficult to use.

Quote - > Quote - What Poser needs is good dynamic hair. I second JoePublic that Poser's current dynamic hair makes suitable fur, but I've yet to see it look good as hair.

Wow, can't agree with that. I will agree that dynamic hair needs to have the right material settings in order to look good—but once you've got that, it has twice the potential for realism as even the best transmapped hair (which I've pretty much given up on).

Quote - Poser's dynamic hair is terribly, terribly dated--I really think that an overhaul should be a priority for Poser 10.

There I can definitely agree. While I've tweaked materials to where I'm quite satisfied... I'm nowhere near satisfied with my ability to style dynamic hair. It's far too difficult to use.

Would you mind sharing your settings? Any material I've tried on dynamic hair has looked all right for fur, but has never looked soft enough for human hair--unless you go to the other extreme of "shampoo commercial" hair.  

Hi all. I've been away for awhile, just getting back into doing some things in Poser.

On Hair:

Hair is the most difficult of all things to simulate in 3D, bar none. Nothing is more difficult than creating realistic hair. There are all sorts of reasons for that, a great many of them dealing with complex physics. But, for us simple Poser users, we just want hair that works and looks halfway decent. (If it looks great, that's a bonus.)

I hate Poser's procedural/strand hair. It's usually not very realistic and, of anything I can think of in Poser, creating realistic strand hair is the most difficult task of all. Think differently? OK, go find a plethora of strand hair for sale for Poser and get back to me with that "long list" of available hair... Simply put - It's far too much effort for the return you'll get out of it in a render.

Transmapped hair is the easiest to deal with and provides almost immediate feedback in terms of fit and style as well as giving the user additional opportunities to morph it and see immediate results in the preview window. This is not possible with strand hair as it's procedurally generated.

But, that also means that in order to pose the hair properly, one must have a ton of morphs for any hair that is long enough to meaningfully interact with other things in the environment, like wind, shoulders, the ground, etc... Those morphs take up space.. a lot of space. Poser must be prepared to display the results of moving all those morph dials in real time in the preview window. That means all those morphs get loaded with that hair and they take up a lot of space, being essentially multiple geometry references. Loading up a fully loaded V4 CR2 file with all the morphs you have presents the same problem - Heavy files that take a lot of resources. But, once that file is loaded, it's loaded. Your resources have been eaten up and your system chugs along with what's left.

But, how bad is it, really? It's NOT the actual geometry that's heavy, here. A typical hair model for nicely done medium to long length hair is going to have around 20 thousand vertices. V4 has over 60 thousand. What's causes the extreme "weight" of any CR2 being loaded is goign to be the morphs and rigging, including any JCMs and that sort of junk.

However, on your screen, you can't ignore the fact that your machine not only has to hold all of that along with all the morphs, even if they're not being used, but it has to render that for you in real time, before you can even render it as a dedicated process. Do do that, it has to apply something to the surface and that means textures, transmaps and shaders. Shaders take almost no weight at all. They don't really matter much until the Renderer starts working with them. And, shaders are faster than any pure texture rendering could possibly be, given similar results. There's not a lot that has to be rendered in the preview pane to slow you down, but a heck of a lot that gets added in quality when you're finally rendering.

I like conforming hair for it's ease of use in posing. I don't care much about the weight of a CR2, if I'm getting substantial convenience added with that. If the hair follows the model logically, I may not have to mess with any morphs at all, unlike prop hair files, which I'd have to manually tweak in the preview pane.

A couple of things that people could do in order to reduce the load:

A) Use Morph Manager or a CR2 editor to delete the morphs you don't want and then save the conforming hair as a separate CR2. This will reduce the file size dramatically if it has a lot of morphs.

B) If you don't need a 5000 x 5000 hair texture... don't use it at that resolution. Textures take up the bulk of the space in most Poser content, especially when they're needlessly large. Vendors seem to love to tell people they have uber resolution textures when hardly anyone is going to ever render at a resolution that would really benefit from those overly large sizes... So, take the texture to Gimp, reduce the resolution to something manageable for the sort of rendering you're going to be doign, then apply that lower res texture in the material room. Save a library of Low Res Hair textures for distance shots. You don't need a 5k x 5k texture at 300 yards with anything, unless it's 300 yards worth of big! (But, don't get me wrong, a high res texture is critical for optimum rendering in suitable shots. It's just not always needed, especially if you've got Texture Filtering murdering your texture before it even gets a shot at being rendered at that level of detail!)

C) Use magnets. Poser gives the user the capability of making just about anything look hideous through the use of magnets. :D But, with magnets, you can do a suprisingly good job at posing hair in a realist manner. However, that will not always work well with conforming hair as it has an underlying bone structure that will not be manipulated by the magnet, resulting in polygons that get mushed between conflicting commands. So, use magnets liberally on prop hair. The "Hair Control System" works very well for all sorts of hair, but you can do the same thing with your own magnets, given a bit of time. Lots of magnets can take up a lot of room in your scene, but the advantage is that you can add or delete them at will, as it suits you.

D) Where possible, use shaders to do the bulk of your work for you. A good baseline texture and transmap is essential. But, no hair, anywhere, will have a hope of looking realistic without a decent shader tree containing specular, blinn and all those nifty nodes that make hair "pop." Make use of that tree! A medium texture with a high res transmap and decent procedural shader tree is going to be lighter on the front end than an overly large texture. However, on the back end, during rendering, some of those shaders are going to take a bit of dedicated processing power to work out.

E) On animation - Hair is the most difficult of anything to animate for any studio, period. Don't think you're goign to animate wonderful hair in Poser. You won't. The best you can do is animate and render "acceptable" hair for the quality of animation capable in Poser. Animating hair and how well it turns out depends on the model and the conditions. If it's windy, only procedural hair is going to have the right responses, but it's still going to look like a ratty mop... IMO. Poser will have excellent and realistic hair about three days after the world ends. So, just be happy with the best you can do and, often, that's going to be possibly using strip hair that has a good transmap, good shaders and decent base textures, whether or not it's conforming or a parented prop.

E) A final note on realism: For poly hair/strip hair, typically used in conforming and prop hair models, nothing is more important than a good transmap. Nothing. Only a good transmap can accurately simmulate the fine strands we have come to expect to see in hair and what we think we are getting as a quality improvement with procedurally generated hair... If your hair model looks crappy, it's likely got a crappy transmap. Terrible textures abound and plenty of people buy them, for some reason. So, that could be an issue, there's no escaping that one. (How many darn colors of hair can a human being have and how many passes through Hue and Saturation does a typical hair-color vender go through?) But, even a crappy texture will look a lot better with a good transmap and shaders than strip hair with a bad transmap to begin with. Check your transmaps. If they're crappy, try to improve them. Sadly, transmaps for hair are HARD to do, just like anything that's worthwhile. So, there aren't a lot of resources out there, considering the difficulty and the attention to specific details required in different models.

Excellent free resources on-topic with my post:

http://www.sharecg.com/v/30625/gallery/11/Poser/HAIR-Colours-CREATOR---Poser

(Hair Color Creator by Abacus 3d) - If you have Poser and render hair, you want this. It has shader trees setup for a huge variety of different colored hairs.

http://www.morphography.uk.vu/dlutility.html

Morph Manager -An ancient Poser tool that I still use frequently. Use it to rip morphs out of your hair or add them (from the same hair geometry) to your prop hair, as needed.

http://my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/1113.html

SM - Using Magnets in Poser - Tutorial - Yes, you can use them on hair with great effects. But, prop hair without complex rigging would generally work better than conforming hair,when dealing with magnets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8jxSOL_MAM

Video - Joint Parameters and Rigging Tutorial by PhilC - Useful for understanding how and why hair conforms the way it does and how you can edit those joint parameters to twean how conforming hair moves.

(I guess you can't embed links with the [url] command. Fixed them to be naked...)

Quote - (I guess you can't embed links with the [url] command. Fixed them to be naked...)

You should be able to select the text you want to make a link, then click the "chain" icon, to the left of the font selector, in the text editor pane's toolbar. You can then make your link target a new browser tab / window then too (there's a pop up link editor dialog after cliking the chain icon)

Most modern browsers seem to be able to recognise a selected link... and give you a right-click option to navigate to it... anyway though.

Thanks for the tips / links regarding hair :) 

Hey everyone, GREAT NEWS!

There's two new Hair sets in the marketplace as of right now!

And, here's the great part...

They absolutely DO NOT look like 30 or so other hair sets that already exist!!!

Go get 'em, quick!

(Earth shaking sigh)

Quote - > Quote - I have to also agree here. I hate conforming hair. I'll use it if the hair style is one I like, but I most often prefer a hr2 version which I can resize easier to any character or put on a male. I suppose it would be way to complicated to come up with a python script to convert conforming hair to a hr2 right?

Ever try just loading a conforming hair and not comforming it... rather parenting it to the head? This is how I tend to use them.

This is how I have been fitting hair to Anastasia and I have found it to be quite useful.

Lay Down morphs would be huge.  I saw a hair figure with one once, would love for more figures to include that kind of morph.

It would be really nice to do with a pony tail hair, so I can have my model lay on her back with her pony tail laying to the side or straight up on the floor.

I fixed the links for you Morkonan.  And I too would love to see more hair models that have the ability to move away from the neck.  It's just not logical to have a character thowing their head back with the hair stuck to the neck.  (and i hate magnets)  

Quote - I'm with ockham... I dispise Figure hair. The disadvantages SO outweigh any perceived advantage! Rather than make the hiar a figure, fitted to a single character, put that work into morphs for the hr2. It makes for a much more flexible, useful product.

I thought the perceived advantage was people needing to buy the hair for any figure they want to use it with...

I'm with this, it was a problem for me just a few days ago.

Quote - I fixed the links for you Morkonan.  And I too would love to see more hair models that have the ability to move away from the neck.  It's just not logical to have a character thowing their head back with the hair stuck to the neck.  (and i hate magnets)  

You can accomplish that by adding morphs. Morphs alter the geometry, radically, and the mesh will obey the morph deltas. However, when the morph is radical and outside of the joint parameters or radically changes the object in some way, you can have problems.

For example, go grab Koz's Long Hair Evolution freebie. A google should turn it up. It's one of the nicest freebies ever and very versatile. IIRC, there are plenty of morphs in that hair that demonstrate the ease of moving hair away from the conformed joint.

Magnets can help, but they are going to fight with the joint parameters effecting the hair and any morphs that are currently active. Magnets work very well, but take some finessing, especially if you have several morphs to the geometry already active, as those take precedence and alter how the geometry is going to respond to a magnet.

One of the best things you can do is to create morphs to for your hair in order to satisfy your needs. Sometimes, this can be done with just some magnets. Other times, it requires a 3D modeller to get the morphs just right. It's easiest if the hair is all one group, that way you don't have to go through any lateral workflow in order to regroup the model, morph it, then reapply the original groups. (It's not difficult to do, it just takes some getting used to.)

One thing you can try with a magnet is to parent a magnet to the hair, hopefully it's all one group (neck) which is common, then place the magnet outside the boundaries of the geometry of the trailing ends of the hair (if it's long) with the falloff just on the edge of the geometry. Then, move the magnet so that the hair "swings" with it. It takes some finessing to get the location of the inner and outer zones aligned properly, without severely deforming the mesh. You usually have to move the magnet radically, since just a small amount of the total force is being transmitted, since you're depending entirely on "falloff" to do this. But, it can be done fairly quickly and yield hair that appears to flow appropriately with gravity, instead of just the neck joint it's conformed to. (This is similar to using helper bones in skirts, but here it's just a magnet. Active morphs may disrupt this, though.)

Lastly, in some hair, the joint parameters are such that the inner and outer zones of the neck joint parameters are almost larger than the screen... These respond.. funkily :) , to magnet and joint manipulation, so creating morphs for them is the easist way to get the look you want. (A few creators seem to favor this technique and it works very well. It just has problems when you're trying to manipulate it in ways it doesn't want to go. ;) )

PS - Tks for the linkfix. I knew I could have used the forum's link tool, but after blitzing through the post and just using standard BBCode, I didn't feel like going back and typing even more stuffs...