So this morning, I posed a suggestion about the Hair Room UI needingan update or better yet streamlining since it hasn't had one in about 10 years. So I had some time to kill today and thought I go a little re-imagining.

I'll explain my thinking a little as we go along, but I'd really like to hear what you think.

So the basic layout of the Hair Room, I'd probably leave as is.

I wouldn't make any changes to the growth group pallete either. Well, maybe one. I'd add an option to mirror one side to the other. To make it easier to create the hair groups. I tried to grow some hair on the Hivewire cat, god, that takes forever!

For the hair growth controls, I'd get rid of the last three dials that control the direction of the hair growth. My thinking on that is that gravity should always be the default setting in the Hair Room and should always be set at 100% strength. 0% would be full off. Hair should float at that point. Gravity, of course, can be set where ever you want.

Next, a before and after view of the Styling Controls pallette. I did change this around somewhat drastically. The Clumpiness, Kink Strength, Scale and Delay are gone. I replaced them with Hair Types. They are Straight, Wavy, Curly, and Kinky. Obviously, at 100% you'll get each of those Hair Types. At a lower strength, you can mix them up and get straight hair with some curls, or some waves. Kinky Hair at 100% strength would basically be giving you dreads. 25-50% would give you an afro. Vary the length, a bit, lower the gravity and give yourself a Jermaine Jackson or Diana Ross style fro.

I still have some changes to make on the Dynamics Controls. There are two palletes that are similar and different, meaning that both contain things like Gravity, Root Stiffness, Damping, etc. I'll check more into that later.

In the meanwhile I'd like to hear what you think of my UI redesign.

When creating groups, it would be nice if they could span more than one body part. It would make making fur for animals or clothing easier. I think you would still need a delay for kink, wavey and curly. Some people's hair is straight for the first few inches and then switches. I do agree that the last three in pallet 2 are not needed. They're almost useless since they change how much they pull the hair depending on the number of verteces.

Well, I'm not totally convinced that a Kink delay is needed. In fact, I'm not sure most users would know what a Kink delay even is. That's another gripe of mine. Poser, under SM, seemed to delight in the fact that they knew the scientific names of certai things, including muscles in figures. Look at Alyson2 for proof. She must have over 50 morphs , but you don't know what it's a morph of. You have to literally use it to find out.

I think using the scientific names of anything is fine, but not for artists and new users. That's why I think Poser should make things easier to use. Make the dials and sliders measures of strength from 0 to 100%. Don't have the user googling "kink delay" to find out what it is and where to set the dial. It should work like the Walk Designer. So if you set the strength of the dial at, say 90% for curly hair, the last few inches of hair would be just wavy or close.

The Grouping Tool has been my Poser Nemesis ever since Poser 2. Why they had to make it a part of the Cloth and Hair Rooms, I'll never know.

The only thing that gives me as much trouble is magnets.

This does confirm a part of my theory though, that the last three dials on the Hair Growth Pallette aren't really needed. I used a skullcap and create a hairgroup. I included it all because I didn't want to waste the time selecting different groups. Anyway, After I create the hair, I bypassed everything else and went to the dynamics controls. I skipped those before but, I'll talk more about them in awhile. There are two of them by the way, one for Poser legacy and one for Bullet Physics. Again, I'll explain the difference later. I chose to use the Bullet Physics controls to run. One thing to note here that I did not know, is that the minus sign on the dial means more gravity. No sign is less. I set the gravity at -100. Didn't really touch anything else. I turned on the simulation, and let the gravity pull on the hair strands. Sure enough, the hair fell down the side and back of the head as it would in nature. This was just a proof of concept render, but I would have created another hair group above the face for bangs if I were making a real render.

I agree with the naming leaving a lot to be desired, but that wasn't SM's doing. That was like that before they got a hold of it. I know it was like that since version 6. That's when I started so I can't say anything about 5 when it was added.

I don't have much trouble with the grouping tool. It's not any different than selecting faces in blender. You just have to watch selecting faces on the other side. They really need to fix that. It does help me to hide the other objects.

You do realize I now want to make more hair. I don't need the frustration, but I'm going to look into making something.

I use Pull Down. Gravity doesn't have the same effect, at least for longer hair.

I'd like to see skullcaps made especially for dynamic hair. Most of the skullcaps out there are very high-res. My dream skullcap would be low-res, with higher-res strips along the forehead and temples - the places where you'd see the roots.

Also, the bane of the hair room for me is those stray hairs that often show up, for no reason I can figure out.

[As for the gravity being downwards with the minus sign... we use that same convention in Marvelous Designer... It just is the directional indicator for the vertical axis.]

A lot of years ago, I played with the hair room, and figured out how to save my own presets, for re-use on other items/figures. I do hope you can keep that functionality intact!

Okay, my nemesis and I are tangling again. I can't seem to create more than one hair growth group on a skull cap. And how do you save the growth group once it's created?

Going back over my hair experiment files, it looks like the hair settings get saved as a part of the figure or prop that they are on, and not as a separate hair setting file. So... not functioning the way I (mistakenly) remembered. It would be nice if they could be saved separately, so they don't have to be copied by hand...

On a side note about your proposal to simplify the style options to certain human hair styles.

While this will be good for human hair, I found the 'Clumpiness' setting invaluable for furs. Matted wool, short matted bear fur, etc.
You can see a medium length style in the capelet of this figure; Noordman
And a longer version on these caps (second image) Fur caps for M4

I have a script, called hair settings, that will save the settings, but I don't use it often. It had been written by cage, but I don't know where his stuff is hosted anymore. If anyone knows, maybe they can post it

I'm still not seeing the need for a clumpiness dial. I've created a fur hat before without it. The coat, btw, is not mine, it's Glitterati's.

Still can't seem to work the Grouping tool, but I'll keep at it. I did manage to keep the hair from going into the figure this time. You just have to enable collisions in the properties panel for every figure in the scene that the hair will collide with. Again, I like to use the Bullet Physics Dynamic controls, not the Poser Legacy one.

What problem are you having with the grouping tool?

I want to shorten or eliminate the hair falling in front of LaFemme's face. I can select the poligons of the skullcap and eliminate them from the hair group with no problem. But I want to create a second hair group for the same area I just eliminated to create a shorter group of hair for the bangs and to show her face.

Here's a sample of different hair groups used in Poser:

https://youtu.be/po5EF1PwtXs

It's "Poser Pro Sexy Manga Dancer Dynamic Hair Test" if Rosity nukes the link. There are three hair groups. Only one of them was run with collisions on. The other two were no collisions (which you can see when she turns her back - the hair in back goes through her shoulders).

(Though it's age-restricted, she's dressed, and the naughty bits remain covered.)

I like the idea of having separate upper and lower groups on the back of the head. Hair growing from the lower back of the skull isn't very important in most images (though you'd miss it if it weren't there!) I like the idea of being able to make that coarser, with fewer vertices, and save resources for more visible hair over it.

Create a new hair group, edit group, and select only those faces. I recommend setting the element style to textured lined (or one of the other lined displays) so you can see the faces better. If your existing hair isn't styled yet, you can look close to where the roots are to see what you already have selected. Then click grow hair.

It would be easier if there were skullcaps meant for dynamic hair. All the ones I know of are just one group. I want one that has different groups, to match where you'd want different hair types for dynamic hair. Then you could just select all for that group. And low-res, so Poser doesn't choke. (I remember someone offering skullcaps for dynamic hair that had just 8 polys. That's probably not necessary these days, but most skullcaps are way more high res than they need to be for dynamic hair.)

I want higher-res strips along the edges in front, to avoid that Barbie wire-haired look. A section in front for bangs. Upper and lower sections at the back of the head, so the top part could have more vertices than the under part, which wouldn't really be seen in most images.

randym77 posted at 3:59PM Wed, 19 February 2020 - #4381067

I like the idea of having separate upper and lower groups on the back of the head. Hair growing from the lower back of the skull isn't very important in most images (though you'd miss it if it weren't there!) I like the idea of being able to make that coarser, with fewer vertices, and save resources for more visible hair over it.

I find it easier to work with several small groups. I often have 2 or 3 per side plus 2 or 3 for the back and 1 or 2 for the bangs. The hard part is making sure you get the hair to lay the same between groups so you don't see a seam.

Quick question: I was speaking earlier about how it would be nice if you could mirror the other side of a skull cap when you create a hair group. I found out today that the Grouping tool has a mirror option in it. Can you use that option to create another half of a skullcap?

While I agree that for most users, the desire would be for smooth, uniformly distributed hair. But for certain long fur, or wool looks, the clumpiness setting is critical. I have also gone with the short, smooth look for fur, as well. The trick seems to be vastly increasing the hair density.

Okay, well, personally, I don't like, need or want the clumpiness, but if there is a genuine need and desire for it, then of course, you're right and it should stay in.

randym77 posted at 5:18PM Wed, 19 February 2020 - #4381070

It would be easier if there were skullcaps meant for dynamic hair. All the ones I know of are just one group. I want one that has different groups, to match where you'd want different hair types for dynamic hair. Then you could just select all for that group. And low-res, so Poser doesn't choke. (I remember someone offering skullcaps for dynamic hair that had just 8 polys. That's probably not necessary these days, but most skullcaps are way more high res than they need to be for dynamic hair.)

I want higher-res strips along the edges in front, to avoid that Barbie wire-haired look. A section in front for bangs. Upper and lower sections at the back of the head, so the top part could have more vertices than the under part, which wouldn't really be seen in most images.

I don't understand what you mean by having one group. You make your own groups in the hair room. Haven't them set out in advance wouldn't work because different styles would need different groups.

8 polygons would be way too few for anything but a bob or an afro. If you use any clumping, you need more. Each face is 4 clumps. The hair pulls towards the corners. Here is with 100 polygons per side compared to one per side.

RedPhantom posted at 6:09PM Wed, 19 February 2020 - #4381087

I don't understand what you mean by having one group. You make your own groups in the hair room. Haven't them set out in advance wouldn't work because different styles would need different groups.

I think you could have groups set up ahead of time that would work with most styles. I find creating groups in Poser kind of a pain. Not just in the hair room, in general. And having different polygon densities in different groups would be very useful, IMO.

8 polygons would be way too few for anything but a bob or an afro. If you use any clumping, you need more. Each face is 4 clumps. The hair pulls towards the corners.

It actually worked pretty well, IIRC. They were designed to fit inside the head (Poser ignores collisions near the root, so it's okay if the hair grows through the surface of the head). The person who made them also made some fairly elaborate hairstyles with them, which she gave away as freebies. I think her site has long been offline, though.

The idea of using low-res skull caps was to be able to make the hair extremely high-density without choking Poser.

Also, one of my favorite tips is from kirwyn. He made skullcaps rotated backward about 30 degrees. When imported into Poser, hair grown on the skullcap has a natural backward flow that keeps the hair out of the figure's face.

I just noticed English Bob's website is offline. He used to host Kirwyn's Genesis Hair. Which he named before DAZ named their figures.

You can still download it through the Wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190812021430/http://www.morphography.uk.vu/dlkirwyn.html

He used a low-res skullcap (though not 8 poly low-res) and a low-res figure proxy to speed up the simulations. Here's an animation he made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtto4KGxSHw

Bob announced back in November that Morphography would be closing.

EClark1894 posted at 7:00PM Wed, 19 February 2020 - #4381096

Bob announced back in November that Morphography would be closing.

I saw the notice on his front page (via the Wayback Machine). He said it's all right to distribute any of his stuff freely, but that those whose work he hosted might have different policies.

Anyway, try using Kirwyn's skullcap. I bet it will solve your "Hair in La Femme's face" problem.

randym77, which figure do you want a skullcap for?

RedPhantom posted at 7:30PM Wed, 19 February 2020 - #4381102

randym77, which figure do you want a skullcap for?

La Femme? It doesn't matter that much because the skullcap doesn't have to fit perfectly for dynamic hair. The super low poly skullcaps date from Poser 5 and aren't necessary now, but I think 400 polys is better than the more typical 4000. IIRC, Poser 5 had 2000 poly skullcaps for their dynamic hair, which made everyone think dynamic hair sucked. They cut it back to 200 polys in Poser 6.

I typically set the dynamic hair skullcap just inside the skull; hair looks very natural growing out of the head. Then add a standard painted skullcap like 3Dream's if more coverage is needed after running the sim.

You know what I'd like to add to the hair room? How about replacing the Pull Down, Back and Side choices with a "comb" or "brush"? and adding a pair of scissors to "cut" the hair strands? I'd also replace the "Kink Delay" dial by making it more target specific. Just select the hairs you want to apply a kink or hair type to and select the hair type.

Also, just because I'm weird like that, I'd change the Hair "Room" to a Hair "Salon".

I'm just thinking out loud here, but another benefit of replacing "Kink Delay" with Targeted styling: Hair curlers!

So, it snowed here last night. I didn't get snowed in, it's just a dusting, but it's too damn cold to go outside. Anyway, gives me a chance to go further into detail about changes I'd like to see in the Hair Room. One of those would be to eliminate confusion. So, I'd get rid of the Poser Legacy Dynamic Hair Controls. Why? Well, after reading the Reference manual again, I see that the Bullet Physics pallete is actually supposed to be an improvement over the Poser Legacy controls.

For the most part, the Bullet Physics Controls, Simply combines several dials, or leaves them out all together. Such as the Tip Stiffness dial. It combines the Air Damping and Spring Damping dials into one dial simply called "Damping". It also adds a dial for Collision margin adjustment, so you can set the distance the hair comes to another prop or figure in a scene. The Friction dial determines the amount of "drag" hair has when it collides with another choreographed object in the scene. The final dial has me at a loss. "Mass" , according to the manual, will not have an effect using the Bullet Physics for hair. But it's not on the Poser Legacy control at all. So, if it has no effect, and it's not replacing something, why the hell is it there?

I'm also at a loss to explain the Gravity dial. In the manual, Bullet Physics seems to be set about 10 times higher, but there's no explanation for why. So far, I have seen a difference in the way it acts.

Also, I'm having a small issue with hair selection. When I tried to select the hair I want to do something to, I end up also selecting the hair on the opposite side of the head. Anyone have any suggestions about how to avoid doing that?

I didn't think Bullet had anything to do with the hair system, I always thought it was its own thing!

Retrowave posted at 9:48AM Fri, 21 February 2020 - #4381254

I didn't think Bullet had anything to do with the hair system, I always thought it was its own thing!

You can use Bullet Physics in conjunction with The Hair Room, The Cloth Room, or by itself in Poser. Anything that uses animation.

Oh I know that, it just looked from one of your posts that you thought Bullet might be involved in the hair calculations, but anyway, since this is a Hair Room feedback thread, I might as well throw my own feedback into the mix:

• Get rid of it completely and replace it with a modern hair system that can be combed and cut interactively.

OR:

• Add hair combing.
• Add hair cutting.
• Fix it so that it can be animated predictably without going-off into a spasm.

To be perfectly honest I absolutely hate the current Hair Room. Life's just too short to even bother with it. I gave-up using it to create hairstyles pretty much from the start. The only use I found for it is pubic hair, it's good for a bit of bush, and for using on the body as downy hair or 'peach fuzz' as the saying goes.

Although I've seen a lot of brave efforts, I've never seen a convincing hairstyle come out of the thing yet. So maybe it's time to stop licensing that hopeless hair system, and licence a much better one instead!

EClark1894 posted at 11:40AM Fri, 21 February 2020 - #4381247

Also, I'm having a small issue with hair selection. When I tried to select the hair I want to do something to, I end up also selecting the hair on the opposite side of the head. Anyone have any suggestions about how to avoid doing that?

No. I gave up making hair groups on both sides of the head because of that. What you can do is have the display set for 2 viewports and set one so you can see the area your working on. The other set at an angle where you see the other side without the first being behind it. So for a left / right problem, put a second camera looking at the figure from the front.

I often use 4 viewports Top, Face, Left (or right) and Front (or back) when I make hair.

I believe they had a problem like that at one time with the morph brush. Difference was that it would change from one figure to another.

Is it possible to make long straight shiny silky hair? Love esther PS your fur looks incredible!

It is possible, although technically, I have not done it. The Hair Room will let you set both the Length and kinkiness of the hair.

estherau Like this?

Set kink to 0 and use a shiny texture

RedPhantom - that is very very close. Still looks a little bit kinky in places.

I think RP might have that Kink Delay she likes so much still on.

I think I've figured out what the Mass dial is used for in the Hair Room. I was just reading up on Bullet Physics. Mass is used to increase the Mass of an object, making it basically lighter or heavier. I still have more reading to do, but I think Mass increases the mass of hair in some way I still haven't quite figured out correctly yet.

How does this look for a skullcap? It's 696 faces. About 400 of that is the higher resolution for the edge.

I like it, but I'd probably subdivide at least once more for fuller hair. But that's just me. I'd also probably recede about half an inch on the forehead.

Hey all, my first post. Great idea from EClark1894 to try to do something with the hair room UI. I recently tried using it in an animation, and found that long hair swings and flies nicely. So I'd say the Hair Room actually does some good work if you beat your head against a wall long enough, and it could be made a real asset to Poser. However, it does the basics so badly (or not at all) that it seems everybody is agreed that it's best avoided, which is a real shame. Good news is, fixing those basics often looks like major gain in useability for (relatively) little development work.

• First off, I really liked Retrowave's fourth bullet - 'fix it'. Couldn't agree more. Fix the existing facilities BEFORE trying to load new features on top of them.

• Agree the basic layout is okay.

• Agree very much with RosemaryR - we need to be able to store our own parameter values and apply them to a new hair group wih a click. And I'd also like to add the effects of the styling tool to the job. If I happen to stumble upon that perfect flick of the mouse/pen that styles a right-side hair group just the way I want it, I want to mirror that effect onto the corresponding left-side group with a click; and transfer it to figures in other scenes as well. The Library seems like the obvious place for all this.

• I agree groups are a real pain. When we're defining a group, we need to be able to see the ones we've already made, without having to switch between groups, trying to remember where the edges were. And we need to mirror existing groups - we can already mirror a single group from side to side, but once I've made (say) a left temple group I also want the mirroring facility to create the mirror-image right temple group with a click.

• More generally, I don't think groups were ever the right approach. They create sharp boundaries between groups with hairs of different lengths, different bendiness, etc, and that's not what my hair looks like. Some kind of weight-mapping approach might be better, but I'm sure that's not an easy fix.

• Also agree the three "pull" parameters could be removed, though of course they should stay if others have found a use for them. They could be more useful if we could vary the effect along the length of the hairs, but at present they apply equally from root to tip and I just don't find that much use.

• I found root stiffness was really important when animating long hair, but it seems to go from 100% at one hair segment to 0% on the next, and that can produce an awful effect. It needs to taper. Various ways to do that - maybe stay at 100% to the existing falloff point, then taper to zero at the tip.

• The "pull" parameters, root stiffness and bend resistance would all benefit from user-defined strength curves, like you can do in Blender. (But we should be prioritising high-value/low-cost jobs and this one probably won't qualify.)

• Trivial, maybe, but let's have useful defaults on the parameters, if only to help beginners get started. At present, if you use the defaults on long hair, you end up with a burst mattress and as a beginner I had no clue where to start tweaking. Default gravity, for example, is way too low on both engines so the hairs fall too slowly. I find I need it to be 5-10 times stronger than default. The values of other parameters are arbitrary so, if we have to keep entering new values by hand, the useful values shouldn't be 0.00015 and -0.0003. I suggest finding values that're useful in simulations, call them 100 in each case and set them as defaults.

• Sorry, but: Improve documentation. New users especially need far more info than is available. For example, does a high bend resistance affect the speed of bending, the maximum extent of bending, or both, or something else entirely; does it make the hair spring back in subsequent frames or does it resist that bending too? And what's the difference between bend resistance and position force? I haven't a clue what the answers are.

• When using the styling tool, we can adjust the immediate zone of influence using the slider. I'd also really like to see where the zone is, highlighted on the hairs.

• I don't find clumpiness useful. It might have been very useful if it made long hair look greasy, dirty, wet or otherwise unkempt/realistic, but it would have to randomise the clumps for that. At present the clumps are as regular as the head polys, which generally is very regular, and I can't see any use for perfectly regular clumps.

• As for the 'stray hairs' that randym77 mentions: I had that happen too. When defining a group it's really easy to select polys accidentally and without realising it. For example, you select some polys on top of the head and when you grow the hairs you find you somehow also selected a poly up the right nostril. It can be really hard to find it, so how could you have selected it? Beats me. I suspect there's something wrong either with the model (V4?) or the selection tool.

• Finally, there's major bugs in the engines - legacy has hair explosions and hair sliding up and over the head with quite a gentle turn of the head, and Bullet can't do collisions reliably - but they're not part of the UI that EClark1894 asked for comments on, and I'm sure they'd need a lot of resource to fix. That said, and since others have mentioned collisions, I have to say they are crucial; we just can't use an image/animation that has hairs diving into an eyeball and coming out of the mouth, no matter how slick the UI was. The legacy engine does collisions very slowly but it often gives tolerable results in the end. But I never got good collision results with Bullet. Okay, it can cope with glancing collisions like in EClark189's image, but if the hairs intersect something at a big angle - like long hair when it hits the shoulder - I always found they dive straight in, regardless of collisions. So I gave up on Bullet and I don't know much more about it. (Except - to pick up on a discussion above, I recall reading a long time ago that mass and friction never had any effect in the hair room.)