Hello everyone... first time posting here and I apologize if this subject has been addressed before, but my internet is acting too wonky to effectively search for past posts that may address it.

I re-textured James and created fiber hair for him and it looks excellent. For his eyebrows, I exported the model and created the fibers in another program (Lightwave) and then imported the result.

The eyebrows look good (not great... just good) BUT when I used Talk Designer to set the model up for speaking, brow movements in the animation do not make the eyebrows move.

I understand the why; my imported eyebrows are not affected by the morphs that make the model's brow move during the animation.

My question to you fine people is, how can I get them to move with the brow movements? Is there a way I can do that, or do I need to re-do the eyebrows natively?

Thank you in advance for any advice you can provide!

If you have Poser Pro then you can add all the morphs you need for the head to the eyebrows with the Copy Morph function. Up in the Menue/Figures/Copy Morphs.

Thank you, ghostman... I appreciate the advice. I will try that out.

My one concern is that the character's brow movement is added through Talk Designer... will the copy morphs work in that situation?

If the brows are conformed to the figure i don't see why it shouldn't work.

So, I tried this but unfortunately, it doesn't work (or more specifically, I couldn't get it to work).

The eyebrows are props... all of the fiber are props, even the hair I built in Poser Pro.

The Figure menu only allowed me to Copy Morphs from the fitted jacket; there was nothing else in the dropdown to copy morphs from under the Figures > Copy Morphs menu.

So I selected Copy Morphs from the Objects menu, and I copied the morphs from James Brows All, Brow Up, Brow Down, etc. to the fiber eyebrows.

No change in the eyebrow fiber movement; they stay static while the brows move behind them.

Yeah. They need to be conforming eye brows. Not props.

Is there any way to convert them to conforming?

somnulus posted at 6:30PM Tue, 16 July 2019 - #4357158

Is there any way to convert them to conforming?

Select the prop and go into the Setup Room. Poser will ask if you want to turn the prop into a figure, confirm that you do.

Once there, load your base figure from the library - this should copy the bones over to your new figure. (You can select just the bones you want from this, but if you're gonna turn some off, make sure that you're keeping all the bones starting from the hip all the way to the head. If this will be just for your use, I suggest keeping them all just to avoid trouble - if you're distributing this, you might wanna keep it clean. There are video tutorials here at Rendo about this, I think.)

Best way that I have found, and this has been discussed in the past, it to use Poser hair room lashes and brows because they always follow the underlying geometry. => In the hair room you can "grow hair" directly on the original geometry.

We had many examples in the now "gone" RDNA forum. Some of those test results are on my old PC if I am not mistaking.

The only thing that kept us from continuing was a well known Poser bug. => Yep, it is 31615 again.

When you save a figure with hair grown directly on its geometry, Poser splits all vertex groups into individuals creating double vertex at all welds when saving.

Just curious and I have never messed extensively with Poser's Hair Room (Because it's Poser's Hair Room) and haven't used Talk Designer. But..

Do you think the following will work - Copy the underlying geometry. IIRC, the brows are a rigged bit, so you can target them for export. Import that object, grow your brows, parent it to the Brow rig. Done.

It's likely Talk Designer can't see the dynamically generated brows as a rigged object and won't animate it. If so, it may not recognize the parented object's relationship to the rig, either, thus not moving them. In that case, it has to be rigged separately as a "Figure" and conformed. Even so... I don't know enough about Talk Designer to deal with that if it inserts custom animations. That's a Talk Designer thing and may require special secret knowledge stuffs...

But, the thing is we're tied to the limitations of Poser's Hair Room system and what it ends up producing. As you note, as soon as you save a "Rigged" dynamic hair object... you may as well slit your wrists. What you could do, I suppose, is create the figure for it, save that figure with no dynamic hair, then when you need rigged dynamic hair for Talk Designer to muck with, you load up the prop/object hair you've generated and then go into the Setup room, open you Library to the rigged version of it that doesn't have hair and double-click. That will apply the rig to your otherwise static hair object, provided it has a standard mesh to reference as the base. Exit the Setup room and there's your ready-to-use rigged eyebrow object... Dunno how useful that workflow would be, though, and you can't "save" it like that, else it makes Poser angry.

(The Hair Room is one of those things everyone wants improvements for.)

Last - Standard transmapped hair can be pretty darn complex and yield good results. Not worth it for you? Talk Designer can't deal with it or something? Also - Someone produced some actual polygon "body hair" for Poser figures. This is hair that isn't in Posers two-dimensional sort of Strand format. It's actual polygons. (Same guys that did the custom V4 JCMs, IIRC.) That could offer a solution for you if it includes eyebrows. I don't see why it wouldn't and, in any case, it gets you out of the Hair Room Problem and into "polygons" which are less trouble.

The problem with the fibre brows, or lashes for that matter, is that they do not automatically inherit morphs as Poser's dynamic hair does. Unless you UV map the fibres, you are also restricted to solid colours, unlike the dynamic hair. The grown hair props will also take transparency mapping of the underlying body part's UV map, to hide some of the grown hair.

I have been experimenting extensively with both forms: dynamic

and fibre (Exnem's Body hair for V4)

The dynamic hair is supported, and in the particular cases of eyebrows/lashes and body hair, would generally not need a lot of simulation beyond initial styling, given their shortness. Texturing and transparency mapping works simply. Downsides are heavy workload for poser, since all of those 2D planes must always be calculated to face the camera, though hair density can be raised or lowered as desired.

Fibre hair seems to (maybe) be less load on Poser, but is more involved to transfer morphs and weight maps to (not required for dynamic). Transfers may not be 100% accurate the further from the body surface the fibres run, and the closer to limb joints they're located. I haven't noticed eyebrows or lashes in that product, but it might be worth enquiring of the vendor (Exnem. Not sure if they're very active on Rendo, I haven't had any response to sitemail enquiries). Again, the downsides of fibre brows/lashes would include the potential order of magnitude more morphs that have to be transferred from the head/face, compared to body morphs/JCMs/weightmaps.

So taking all the feedback into consideration, I saved out a separate scene, deleted my imported fiber eyebrows, and started over again in the hair room.

Right now, I have some eyebrows that I am fairly happy with.

The only issue is that there is no taper to the shape of them at all. The fibers were grown directly from the model polygons and thus, the eyebrow shape is rather blocky.

Is there a method I can use to create taper, i.e., in my preferred modeling program I could use a weight map to control the length and volume of the fibers, or even visibility if desired.

Is there any method similar to that to control fibers in Poser Pro?

Thanks for all of the advice!!

Here is an image for reference.

I just want to taper the outside corners of each eyebrow at the outer edge of the brow, so that they aren't boxy.

The end product is an animation, otherwise I would just fix it in post using Photoshop.

Thanks again for any suggestions or tips!

Pinging for Knowledge. Good useful thread.

Try this thread. https://forum.smithmicro.com/topic/9311/anyway-to-smooth-the-area-for-edit-growth-group-in-the-hair-room/6

I found these in my archives; These where tests for hair room lashes for a hair room enhancement request done in Mei-24-2013

Whaw, I made that hair room enhancement request in 2013. But this was with the hair room "as was at the time".

And I did not change the geometry, just used the default with pretty default hair room settings too. Imagine what "can/could" be done.

somnulus posted at 3:47PM Sat, 20 July 2019 - #4357471

So taking all the feedback into consideration, I saved out a separate scene, deleted my imported fiber eyebrows, and started over again in the hair room.

Right now, I have some eyebrows that I am fairly happy with.

The only issue is that there is no taper to the shape of them at all. The fibers were grown directly from the model polygons and thus, the eyebrow shape is rather blocky.

Is there a method I can use to create taper, i.e., in my preferred modeling program I could use a weight map to control the length and volume of the fibers, or even visibility if desired.

Is there any method similar to that to control fibers in Poser Pro?

Thanks for all of the advice!!

Each of the dynamic hair props will take textures based on the UV mapping of the underlying figure. For eyebrows, you could apply a version of the eyebrow transparency map which is normally applied to the base figure. You'll want to adjust the transparency texture so that it doesn't define individual hair strands, but just the area where you want the dynamic hairs to be visible.

As TonyVilters describes, growing hair directly on the base figure modifies the figure's mesh (apart from the vertex duplication at actor seams) by adding facets to a Hair group, on which the hair strands are grown. Also as you've discovered, this leaves blocky outlines of the hair following the hair facet boundaries. The transparency maps can override this and give you the brow outline you want.

I have been using a second skin figure to grow fur on (as in the first image in my previous post). Since I use a modular system based on the DAZ (V4's creators) system allowing expansion morph packs to be added and loaded onto an empty figure. The upside of this is that any morph changes or additions made propagate to every new figure of that type loaded from the library. However, that causes conflict when I want the figure I've grown hair on to remain based on the original mesh obj file, rather than a newly saved one. The solution I came up with was a script which identifies every actor on the figure on which dynamic hair has been grown (they have a Hair material group) and saving out that actor's unmorphed geometry to a new obj file. To load a figure with hair, I then need the CR2 figure definition file to refer to the original body part group for each actor without hair (no change to them), and the newly saved, individual, hair group containing obj files for those actors with hair grown on them. So I end up with a new, hybrid figure, which still makes reference to the original figure obj file, but incorporates mesh with hair groups on the actors that need them.

The hair groups are absolutely mandatory. Without them, there is no automatic linkage between the underlying figure's morphs and the dynamic hair strands, so the hair won't follow the figure's morphed shape.

If you start with an eyebrow transparency supplied with the figure, you might be able to derive a mask by using a Gain math node set to 1.0 or thereabouts, as a way of eliminating individual hair strands from the transmap and filling them in. You may find it easier to just modify a copy of the transmap in a paint program and fill in the outline of the brows. (The eyes, nose, lips, ears and feet on the Tiger Girl image all have transparency mapping to smooth the outline of the dynamic hair growth groups.

Please let us know how you get on. :-D

I have an eyebrow transmap (very simple map that I created). I used blurring to smooth the values between sharp black and white.

Here is my material set-up for my eyebrows (actually, all of my hair).

I'm not sure where I would apply my transmap, or how because I haven't gotten that deep into nodes. Some nodes are very simple to understand, while others are not.

Normally, as I said before, I would apply a weight map to control the fiber growth; but the Hair room doesn't appear to have any method for doing that.

How would I apply my image transmap to my current eyebrow material to get the result I am looking for?

Well, that's interesting! I wish I was aware of a comprehensive tutorial on the Cycles hair nodes in SuperFly. Looking at Blender/Cycles forums shows me that intercept should return a float with 0 for the hair root and 1 for the tip... Aaaand that's exactly what it says in the Poser Manual too, but without any examples... Uuuntil I look in the libraries under SuperFly Advanced Hair and discover the Hair Compound node examples with multiple Hair BSDF nodes.

What you need to do with your transmap is multiply it by the HairInfo:Intercept output before you plug that into the Transparency input. Unfortunately, Intercept will be 0 at the root, which should be opaque, and 1 at the tip, which should be transparent. That's OK for what you have, with the PhysicalSurface TransparencyMode set to Transparent, but the brow transmap will almost certainly be an opacity map, with black where there's no brow, and white (opaque) where the eyebrows should be.

So, you'll need to change the TransparencyMode to Opaque, and multiply the transmap (Opacity map) with 1 - Intercept. I see that the Advanced Hair shader examples with Poser 11 use a Bias math node so that the tip transparency does not come on linearly, but delays its onset until closer to the tip.

I've grown some quick and dirty brows on the eyeBrow actor of a conformed V4 figure (set to outline mode to highlight the brow guide hairs - Poser doesn't want to display them populated, because I'm running a RayTrace Preview).

Here's the partially completed RayTrace:

I keep having to bump up the hair density to get it to render dark enough to match transmapped brows. Here's my first draft of your PhysicalSurface setup with transmap:

As you can see from the preview, the transmap doesn't gate the specular output, so you need to feed the opacity map into the Specular colour, as well:

Et, voilà!

I very much appreciate all the guidance you have provided, an0malaus... unfortunately, I just wasn't getting any results with your method. The eyebrows looked exactly the same in the new renders.

Part of the issue might have been that I don't have Superfly Advanced Hair in my library. Not sure why, I'm running Poser Pro 11 ver. 11.1.0.34764.

I thought that it might have perhaps been my transmap, but I tested it by running the transparency directly to the UV transmap. It showed that the transmap was accurate, and it also showed the effect of the UV map. The rendered image showed lighter eyebrow hair fibers in the shape of the transmap and darker ones in the areas outside of the desired map area.

I messed around with it a bit more, but I finally realized what was missing from the map; an actual transparency channel.

I created a PNG from my transmap where the eyebrow area was cut away (transparent) and used that in the transparency channel.

That worked very nicely!

I will have to blur the edges of the map just a bit to get a softer edge, but overall, I am very happy with the result.

Thank you again for your help! If you hadn't made suggestions, I wouldn't have had any idea how to get to a solution (these nodes are very different from the ones I am used to working with).

Here is my node structure, in case anyone is interested.

Again, just to reinforce; the image used is a PNG where the eyebrows where cut away. In the PNG, the eyebrow area is transparent.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions!

In case you weren't aware, the latest version of PoserPro11 is 11.1.1.35540.

I have been following this thread with interest and I am surprised that nobody has come up with the answer to the original question, how to make the eyebrows follow morphs. The answer is to use the cloth room.

an0malaus posted at 7:05PM Fri, 26 July 2019 - #4357304

The problem with the fibre brows, or lashes for that matter, is that they do not automatically inherit morphs as Poser's dynamic hair does. Unless you UV map the fibres, you are also restricted to solid colours, unlike the dynamic hair. The grown hair props will also take transparency mapping of the underlying body part's UV map, to hide some of the grown hair.

The first sentence in my original post, though focused on fibre brows, did, in fact, assert that Poser's dynamic hair automatically inherits morphs. This happens without the need to use the cloth room, as it's part of that implementation of dynamic hair from Poser's Hair room.

Poser dynamic hair will move with morphs only if grown directly onto the character. This is not a good tactic though as it means that you have modified the figure and when you save the character poser will also save a new obj file. The hair should be grown on a prop, similar to using a skullcap. This prop can be clothified and all added to the constrained group. When a cloth simulation is run it will follow any morphs. This method can be used on things like shoes so that they bend with the foot without going to all the bother of rigging them.

True, the hoops I had to jump through (writing a python script to save body parts as props with hair groups) were worth doing for very short hair/fur (which would include eyebrows and lashes) which would not always need any simulation applied, since its movements will be far less visible than long head hair. Modifying the figure's CR2 to refer to saved props spawned from the figure's body parts with the hair groups added is not something that Poser does automatically, but with a simple script run, and one-time edit of the CR2 to refer to those saved props, directly grown, short strand hair like fur or eyebrows or eyelashes works very well.

I would not argue for such a process for long hair which needs simulation. All the points you make about low poly scalp props are effective precisely because very few facial morphs affect the scalp area, so one can easily get away without the long hair needing to accurately follow facial expressions. Skullcaps also give better collision simulation performance, indeed there were early props which covered head and shoulders to save calculation time in simulations, especially for high poly figures like V4.

I do see where you're going with the cloth simulation idea, though. That certainly avoids morph transfers or figure modification if one is prepared to do the extra simulation, or are you saying that the hair simulation won't be required...

Definitely worth pointing out that possible workflow. I know I get focused on methods I've spent a while getting to understand and implement successfully, so other options are always welcome. I was desperate for a SuperFly solution, since I used to use micro poly displacement in Firefly to simulate fur, which doesn't work without stupid levels of subdivision, currently.