I came up with the "Super Hair Lock" by creating 3 cylinders coned one inside each other and trans mapped each separately (giving the prop 6 layers of hair in every visual direction) and shaped to look like a natural lock of hair.

Morphed with a few bends and bingo! The prop is morphable in almost any direction, scale and density

I hope to put more morphs into the prop over the next little while. I have about twenty-five now and room for many more and hope to put it up sometime in the free section. I spent a total of an hour making the sampler below including the maps for the hair and creating the individual elements.

The Texture map is nothing but a single gradient and the trans map is nothing but straight white lines on a black background - then a bump created from the trans map.

Think what it would look like if one created a good texture?

Feed back would be appreciated.

Dale MacMullin

I think it looks great and I am always for hair that will have a natural look!

This is how I build my full head models (not all of them public - ie not all of them worthy of being seen in public) but not all of them began as cylinders. And I suppose many others have too, if even I managed to stumble onto the idea. The only difference being, I don't think any of us have made a single lock available on its own. :)

Aha! I've been pondering about that! I need to fix me some hair for an idea I have, - and I haven't seen any that fitted. But no matter how I tried, - it never looked "hairy". This sure is worth a trial, - and I'm very much looking forward to see it in freestuff :) Thanks for thinking about us! Britt

The next step is to create a hair cap and place and arrange many of the locks as natural hair patterns starting at the bottom (small to large and different hair config) and working ones way up the head using different maps of color and density of trans,etc.... but that is later down the road.

This is great. Would love to see what I could do with this...!

Ya know, this is super cool. I hope though that you post the hair lock as it is. One lock, many uses...let us figure it out :) I don't think we need a hair cap, because most of us probably already have 20 from various other hair props we've acquired (most Kaz Hair comes with scalp cap already.) -WTB

after the next step you mention is when people generally regroup the single locks into full hair models or bigger groupings that are easier to manage than possibly 20 or more individual locks on the head. this is where flexibility (of different styles) and user friendliness diverge. to aid in user friendliness, you could distribute cr2s of preset hair styles referencing a single external super lock :)

Thats the hole idea... every one become a CR2 Beautician. :-)

P.S. William I plan to just post the hair lock and see what will happen. I was just giving an example of the process down the road if any one wanted to try it.

(In cartman voice) Sweeeeeetttttttt

What a nifty thing :) Hey - make a row of these for a horses mane. Cool :) The nice thing with this is that it can be stuck onto any existing hairstyle - kinda like Thornes bangs show up everyplace :) Any morphs to taper the connecting end? for a tied off look? Lyrra

... a Super idea. I'll stay tuned. ;=]

Beauty! At last; The Millenium Underarm Hair G (Just kidding! I can see a lot of possibilities in this; Nice Work!)

OOh yes please, thankyou very much. As Lyrra says, horses manes spring to mind. I want to do a pic of a "companion" (any other Misty fans out there ?) and this would be a way cool way to do it.

Leatherguy - ROFL! chohole - the tack'll be tricky but fun to do. Hmmm. Should be interesting to see if you can whip the nag into shape :) I highly recomend getting Pieren Piaffe's Arabian horse headmorph - and keep on going from there :) Mac, Any luck with a twisty spiraly type morph? Lyrra

Lyrra and Chohole, this would be perfect to create manes for horses. I already have a number of morphs in the prop that would several the purpose - bend, wave, radial sphere, twirl, twist and grow long morphs. You can control the patterns on density in two ways - with your trans maps and the thickness scale. A texture that is more short hair at the base and sparse and stringy towards the ends would work very well. In regard to knots and bows... I will try to work on that one. And to Leather Guy? right on... yes I see it and it could work easily for under arms as well. :-) lol

Yes this would be great for horse manes and for feathers (the hair around horses feet) too!

I think this is a great idea! It gives you infinite possibilities for hair styles as long as you're up for a litte work! I'm no good at creating hair textures and trans maps but I do have some I got a while ago that may just work well with it. Hope to see it in free stuff sometime soon. I'm always running out of Hair ideas for my characters. I get bored with what I have :)

FANTASTIC!!! Ooooh! I could kiss you! I could easily create the hair I want with just this!! This is such a fantastic idea!!

AHHH! That is EXACTLY what I needed for this character gave up on because I didn't have that! You're so incredibly wonderful!

All my more recent hair uses cylinders inside cylinders, I thought about another row but the filesize is starting to get up there as it is. Another thing you run into is you have to make the polygons smaller on where you bend the curl, and if you do that everywhere (like you would have too if you could bend everywhere) it also starts getting real big real fast. Ah, for an easy way to make hair!

This will be really interesting to see how it turns out :) Jim, I don't think there is any easy way to make hair, cuz it's still not easy in post even when overpainting hair already there LOL!! Pendy

Yes, I must admit the polygon count is quite high in the prop. I guess I never took into account for animation, since I usually only create stills. I am in the first phases of creating an on line comic book and do have a very powerful high-end machine for ripping or rendering images and do not give it much thought about high polygon counts. It just might give anyone with a low end machine problems if the used a lot of them together. At this point the prop is an experiment and worth a good try If it falls short... there is no problem. :-) Dale MacMullin

I will buy a new machine if my current one can't handle it. LOL! I can already see major possibilities for your great idea! It is seriously perfect for what I want to do. I'm waiting eagerly for it!! =OD

On the polygon count, bear in mind that computers are getting upgraded, you can probably go well over the 20-30,000 polygons that I try to hold to. I think I'm going to allow 45,000 or so on my next hair, if the results justify it. Vickie is about 26,000 polys if I remember, however I think many are still not ready for Dina's 120,000 count, expecially if there is more in the scene than one figure with one hair. For right now I'd try and stay <60,000, at least. I use (roughly) 6 polys around x 45 long x 2 cylinders x 60 curls = 24,300, about what is in the San Francisco hair. You can see how it starts to add up real quick! I save all the polys I can, the inner cylinders have less polygons, I do "wild" hairs that are only 3 around and so on. Anyway, let me say that your curls do look really good, and it is a neat idea- just remember the hair should also be posable, (as a unit) to at least some extent. The San Fran hair is actually a true conforming hair, unlike the Poser 4 "Conforming curls", which only conform to the head and must be manually adjusted for neck twist. While it isn't perfect it will get you in the ball park for most poses, I'm going to try and allow for automatic shoulder movement in the next one, too - right now that part is still manual. Yep, hair is tough, but we all want better hair!

I am going to take your suggestion about the polygon count Jim and I am going to rebuild the prop. I was fooling around last night and found out that the third and middle cylinder really did not make that much difference to the over all visual out come - after making few adjustments to the trans map - no difference at all, but an improvment - all ready one third less polys. By the way they are really not cylinders they act as such visually, but more a less look like triangular fish sticks one inside of each other. With each ones end and corner edges with a clear trans material and mapped only in the middle planes. Thank you for your time and input, you have been most helpful Dale MacMullin