I was just thinking about something I heard a long time ago. Someone had made a video displaying a character with a nice looking head of hair that bounced around and looked real. They said that they had made the hair as a combination of a mesh that they turned into cloth in the cloth room and they used a little bit of the hair room too.

 I was just thinking it would make it very easy if I could find a way to model hair in wings3d and then turn it into a cloth object so it could move in animations. And to give it a little more real feel to it maybe adding some hair in the hair room would be a good idea.

But I was wondering about the mesh made in wings. Wouldn't it need to have layers? Is there anyone who has tried this method of making hair? I could use some tips because I really don't like dealing with strands of hair and trying to style them in poser's hair room. 

 making that type of hair is possible in wings, its basically lots an lots of strips (1 or 2 polys wide and as long as you need, keep polys squarish)

make one strip then uv and dup then fit/style try hard NOT to let them intersect or the cloth room goes berserk on ya

never tried mixing cloth hair with dynamic, might try it one day or wait for your tut ;-) lol  

There is a hair model here i n the marketplace totally based on the cloth room. I have not mastered the new search engine enough to find it, perhaps another member can direct you to the product.

I think Boni is thinking of Dynamic Cloth Hair by Joe Bushido - there's also Dynamic Cloth Hair - Shaara for V4 by WhimsySmiles in freestuff.

Both require patience to get good results. It may be significant that there hasn't been a flood of dynamic cloth hairs, because at first sight it seems like a good idea...

The problem with "dynamic cloth" hair workarounds to achieve "realism" is the computing power it takes to calculate collisions when draping and the unsuitable mechanics of strip hair. Let's say a common "strip hair" (Mesh hair model) has thirty strip pieces to it. The model will have to be set up to work in the cloth room with constraints appropriately placed to keep the hair strips anchored. Then, the dynamics can be applied and self-collision checked. It's that self-collision of so many strands interacting with each other at once that bogs things down.

Also, each strip in a strip hair model is generally made to be viewed from the face of the facing normal. So, what happens during collision calcs when strips twist or get turned in such a way that their normals are at an angle to the camera? Not an issue if you force all normals to face front, one might think, but those textures are still going to be facing in twisted directions, yielding somewhat weird looking hair with splotches of twisted, overlapping, textures.

For simple strip-hair dynamic poses, it's probably not too much of an issue and the deformation of the strips won't cause too much of a problem with a distant view. But, anything radical is likely to cause obnoxious results.

What's needed is a new hair engine for Poser. Poser dynamic hair is virtually absent on every single online Poser retailer's shelf because it sucks, is tedious and difficult to work with, and it looks ghastly when rendered and.. it sucks. Sure, it was probably a great thing when it first came out.. until people actually tried to use it. The only decent hair made with it that I have ever seen was by Adorana (sp). And that was probably pushing the limits of the system. And, unfortunately, it's not something that can't be much more easily accomplished with a standard strip hair model with good transmaps and procedurals. With alternate rigging schemes, even dynamic effects can be mimicked these days with simple morphs and a good rig.

"Hair", in general, has always been the bane of lifelike 3D modeling. Always. It hasn't been until recently that studios had the hardware and tools to make realistic hair. Even then, it's terribly difficult to pull off. Modeled strip hair just isn't able to keep up with the rendering capabilities that provide Poser users with the ability to render lifelike skin and visual effects. The one thing that always kills any lifelike render is the inevitable "helmet head" hair that Poser users are forced to employ. That's why some vendors of character textures seem to enjoy using photoshopped hair cutouts... It makes their product look more realistic.

Poser needs a new hair system that brings it up to par with its other capabilities.

I've done a little experimenting with 'cloth hair' and one problem I consistently ran into was that of the 'ribbons' slipping through the figure mesh edge ways. It seemed like they were slicing into the figure mesh and I couldn't stop it happening. I tried with both dynamic cloth and soft body physics.

The folks who made Look At My Hair for Daz were talking about bringing it to Poser, but I've not heard anything more on the topic. That would be a dream come true.

It's refreshing to see others agreeing with me that Poser's dynamic hair is crap. I've had some rather heated arguments on here with folks who honestly worship the hair room and what it produces, claiming that such results are and will always be a million times more realistic than trans mapped hair... lol, right, yeah.

Would love to see SM license some of these newer technologies.  I kind of see it becoming the only way they can continue forward at some point.  Take a look at TressFX:
http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/tressfx

Now why don't we have that? 

Then look at iClone and its growing list of licensed tech (Physx, HumanIK, SpeedTree...)...

Grrrr.

I've done a little experimenting with 'cloth hair' and one problem I consistently ran into was that of the 'ribbons' slipping through the figure mesh edge ways. It seemed like they were slicing into the figure mesh and I couldn't stop it happening. I tried with both dynamic cloth and soft body physics.

The folks who made Look At My Hair for Daz were talking about bringing it to Poser, but I've not heard anything more on the topic. That would be a dream come true.

It's refreshing to see others agreeing with me that Poser's dynamic hair is crap. I've had some rather heated arguments on here with folks who honestly worship the hair room and what it produces, claiming that such results are and will always be a million times more realistic than trans mapped hair... lol, right, yeah.

Rather than overhaul the hairroom or license another dynamic tech, they could at least try to (creatively) solve the problem of making transmapped hair more dynamic.  Heck, it's not like dang near every video game company of the last 5 years hasn't figured out how to do or fake it...  I have said for a long time (and heard very little back) that Poser needs dynamic zones that work (to the user) like magnets...  Just a simple sphere with a falloff strength and inner and outer zones.  You'd simply align the inner sphere with the character's skull (to constrain the hair at the scalp) and position the outer zone so that the hair was contained within...  Then it would work like a softbody or spring solver, bouncing and twisting the hair in response to the figure's movement, but without the strand twisting and intersecting you would expect to get with a cloth sim.

I guess Smith Micro loves "helmet headed" characters and is quite satisfied with a "Hair Room" that nobody ever uses. Fifty-different ways to play with rendering SSS so skin looks "just right", only to have a head of hair that only looks realistic when it's out of frame. Guess we know what the SM testers are rendering...

 I'd welcome and embrace a huge plugin that works and operates like Clo3d but with Hair.  Clo3d/Marvelous Designer is proof positive that what we all want is obtainable if only someone would program it.  I don't know how, but someone must.  Is it still financially viable to make a piece of software to fill a niche market like us?

I wonder.