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...)