I haven't kept up with things so I was wondering if there has been any advancement in the creation of hair for 3d models? Last I knew Poser was really horrible at this.

This is the most advanced hair system, for professional use, that I am aware of:

Hair Farm

The creation is very easy, and styling tools advanced. You can also use a mesh hair as base for the strand creation, or the other way around. Aside from this, many packages have their own hair gen system, and some use different tech than others. Blender, for example, uses particles for realistic hair creation. Maya has a built-in paint FX system that can be used for hair. I'm not sure what Modo uses, or C4D. The true advancement really comes in the rendering of the hair, not the creation. Vray has a spectacular, realistic volume hair shader, and other render engines have their own native hair shaders that can be more or less realistic.

And... what can we do about Poser?

:)

Poser's "hair" is terrible. One might as well commit oneself to a monestary if one is going to try to get anything besides long straight hair or long extremely curly hair out of it... And, Poser doesn't accept most "line" imports, either, so that's out. (Not sure if 3DS has anything exportable that could help, there.)

Basically, Poser is stuck with transmapped polygon hair, which can give good results, depending upon the transmap resolution, but it's not very versatile. (The dynamics system stickied in the Poser forum does show some promise, though, if it's fast enough for all those polys.)

What can be done? Is there something that the Reality system (Vray) renderer would accept? If so, what would be the workflow, if you know?

"Hair" is the most difficult thing to accurately reproduce in 3D. There have been some interesting breakthroughs, though, but it's still darn tough to get right. Not sure if this is off-topic, here, but without any advancements in that area for Poser, it's never going to be able to give the user hair that is within the standards that other components in the engine can provide. What I want is a workflow that "could" provide for Poser what some other programs can already provide. And, Poser has no particle system to speak of, really. So, that's out.

PS- On above - I should have written "Luxrender" instead of Vray.

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Poser is very limited. I don't have the software to reference, and I'm not sure how it handles "hair" currently. The Luxrender Wiki seems to indicate that it does include a strand primitive, which it says is efficient for large collections of thin strands (hair or fur), and produces them specifically at rendertime, to save resources. It can render as solid, adaptive, and "ribbon" mode. So I assume that this is something Reality supports in order to translate the Poser hair to Luxrender? You'd have to ask in the Reality forum for a definitive answer. The results of the Luxrender translation of hair and fur, in render, does appear impressive from what I've seen by searching.

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Hair_and_Fur

ive seen some fantastic videos on a hair system available for maya, basically draw a couple of splines and the hair kind of "lofts" in between and so is very controllable and the hair render is awesome .

perilous7 posted at 7:10PM Fri, 13 November 2015 - #4238444

ive seen some fantastic videos on a hair system available for maya, basically draw a couple of splines and the hair kind of "lofts" in between and so is very controllable and the hair render is awesome .

Yes, that's the nHair feature in Maya. It's based on the same principals as Hair Farm, but is now included as one of the native hair solutions with the Maya software. It's a great system, and probably the most advanced "native" hair solution in any software package currently.