Wow these are something, good work. Sharen

You guys are really gonna like our new hair feature... Kupa

Ya think, Kupa? g Oh, btw, since we have you here, any chance you guys are gonna rework the libray menu system so we can have subfolders and stuff? Huh? Are ya huh? Pretty please?? Kate (who still misses her multiple column win95 library folders menu and hates hates hates that stupid single column scroller that win98 makes her use)

Any word on WHEN we'll be liking your new hair system? :)~

Yes, Mr. Rex, that is the question I would like to know also. Puh-leeeease can you let us know when we will be liking the new hair system?

Glad to see you're still around. Haven't heard anything new from Curious Lab in so long I was wondering If I'd ever have a chance to give you my credit card number again! :) -SMT

Will we particle-ly like it ?

i don't think i will like it, look at those render times, and more filled in hair would take longer, I'll stick with trans maps and rather lower polygoned hair models. bit i will admit it looks not to bad. the male version looks the best, the females looks a bit weedy.

Drat! Another drive by Kupa tease...er, post.

WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN? WHEN?

Well wolf it's a shame that your thread here had to get derailed so bad cause I think it looks pretty good. How did ya do it?

Attached Link: http://www.annoyances.org/

Looks great! Don't worry about those render times guys, as I'm sure Wolf359 know that Mac is no ball of fire. I'd guess about 1/8 of that on a 1 Ghz Pentium 3.

Due to differences in the system bus, software and other architecture, a 1 GHz Pentium would be about 1.6 - 2 times as fast as a 300 MHz G3, in case anybody has the two available for a validated side-by-side comparison. I think Wolf359 has done some good work here. It indicates that a system like they used in "Monsters, Inc." (key strands) is the way to go with Poser 5 in order to get realistic hair with big savings in replicated geometry. Assuming the people who did "Monsters" don't have a copyright lock on the process.

Hate to be a spoil sport but that's plain aweful. 28 minute render? 6 meg obj file? 65k polys just for a hair piece? Why go through this much trouble to avoid a transmap? If you were in my business as an artist my boss would fire you for such inefficiency. The overdraw on this must be horrific. There's a lot more to rendering than pretty pics. Minimized poly counts, reducing over draw, culling out hidden objects, reducing texture res to lowest possible res, all this makes for good rendering. I'd hate to even try doing a motion file of 120 frames with the guy wig. And I can't even imagine what poser is trying to do with the shadows. If you have 3 lights with shadows in your scene then that's 3 renders onto a shadow map for each strand,each polygon on those wigs. Since the head masks this anyway you won't even see any of the shadowing so its a collosal waste of rendering effort if the wig has shadows on. If the wig does not have shadows on then you won't get a silohette of the wig on a wall or floor. In my book it looks like a lot of hard work you did but its extremely inefficient and I don't think you're getting any bang for the buck over a transmapped wig with less than 100 polygons.

Kate: If your problem is what I think it is, select "List" from Explorer's View options. That should give you your columns back.

I also commend wolf for his innovation

Kupa: Am I wasting my time trying to learn transmap hair modeling?

Wolf, Also think of other things your new field can create. how about a hairbrush, with bristles?

"Hate to be a spoil sport but that's plain aweful." Have you seen it in motion?! "Why go through this much trouble to avoid a transmap?" I believe he was just trying to find a new way to do something. "If you were in my business as an artist my boss would fire you for such inefficiency" I would give him a raise for thinking out of the box, and creating a new field of possibilities. Ben

I'm not discouraging him. I realize its an experiment. I'm just expressing my view. As for firing. If you gave him a raise in my industry you'd get fired.

I wouldn't get fired because I would own the company.

Kupa claims that P5 hair is going to be strand based. How he got Kupa's oopa-loopas to make this renderable on regular computers is what I wanna know...

duane oopa loopas give me the hee-bee-gee-bees, like fingernails on chalk boards.... :-) Transmap hair will always be really useful, especially when combined with strands. It's a great technique to add realism and save rendertime. Kupa drive by tease...er post. That was kewl. ;)

OT: That's oompa-loompas...and one went on to play a goblin in the HPotter movie. And while the tease may have been good for kupa...;-)

If you were in my business as an artist my boss would fire you for such inefficiency.<<< And that is why creativity and innovation dies a horrible death at many companies. Instead of firing him, why not commend him for the seed of an idea, pointing out any weaknesses and giving him the time and encouragement to try and streamline and tweak it? It has drawbacks as mentioned here. However, a seed has been planted on a POSSIBLE way to do something that MIGHT allow more creativity and more realism. But we won't know if the seed-planter gets ground into the dirt with the seed. Keep the ideas coming, wolf. Obviously, from what kupa said, it is an idea others see possibilities in. Take care and be well. casamerica

Mason, I agree on many accounts. I commend the effort and mindset of trying to create better ways of doing things. However, as a modeller, and texture creator: 65,000 polys and no textures? So the render time will be better with a Ghz machine, eh? Try adding a couple high resolution textures, and some scene objects, and look at your render time. Don't get me wrong, I am also looking at some strand-based alternatives. 28 minutes, and no textures?, try dropping "Asia" into that scene. Can you say,"Blue screen of death?" So great work on the effort, and overall its a good start. Work on the poly count though. Just my $0.02 worth ~EA

Attached Link: http://66.70.166.29/motions/walkAE.mpg

that being animated hair in cinema 4DXL 7 VIA a free plugin called "Hair Dept"
(see my test mpeg link please)

a few of us Cinema heads have figured out a way to attach animated flowing hair
(ala Aki Ross), to the heads of our poser figures hosted via the propack hosting plugin
by using their BVH skeletons as an achor
I just happed to notice some of these "wigs" might make decent static hair props
for stills in poser with some effort
and you super hertz pentium owners will do alot better than my ancient G3 thats my point about the render times

trans maps are a good Illusion for still renders but they are a big NO NO !!! in raytraced properly lit computer animation because they dont react properly to changing light and camera angles.

for that you need actual geometry.

"try dropping "Asia" into that scene" Oh boy, I know! I don't have Asia, but I have Yuma, and phew! TAlk about slow on my 1Ghz, (128 MB SDRAM). I still like Yuma though.

Next in hair evoloution. One small step for developers one giant leap for Poser humanity. :) I've seen this before in high end animations and it rocks!

Electric Ardvaark- I agree. I'm not attacking the guy. I commend his efforts to experiment. God knows I've done a few. I'm just pointing out my years of experience dealing with renders and figures. If you have the horsepower and time then so be it. Someone like me who needs to bang out 20 comic pages of stuff a month can't wait 28 minutes for one hair wig to render. This may not be for me but maybe for others. BTW didn't the author of the Beth wig also use seperate strands? Maybe turn those strands into trans mapped slivers that cover more real estate and that might work great.

*clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop BANG! clip-clop... * ;] I think it's got possibilities. Keep playing with it, Wolf.

I think the idea of non-transmapped hair is great, many things currently can't be done because you can't have highlights without messing up the transmaps, and I also thing 65,000 polygons is do-able, especially for the newer, faster computers. **************************************************** I do have some basis for the statement I made about about render times, incidently, here is the times reported on the test file I have in Freestuff. I'm sue the forum software is going to mess up the formatting, but hopefully you will be able to read it. Macs are great computers, but not the fasest on Poser renders. I'm not trying to bash Macs, just trying to say don't be put off by the 28 minutes! The results, as reported by various members of the Renderosity forum: CPU, Speed, Amount of RAM, Operating System, time AMD 2000XP 1G RAM Win 2K 024 seconds AMD 1800 Mhz 1GB Ram Win XP 035 seconds AMD 1800+ Athlon 512 Mb RAM Win XP Home 037 seconds AMD XP 1800+, 1GB DDR RAM, WinXP 044 seconds AMD 1.4 Ghz Athlon, 768 Mb RAM, Win 2000K - 044 seconds. AMD 1.4 Ghz Athlon 768 Mb RAM, Win 98 048 seconds AMD 1.3 GHz 256meg RAM Win 98 048 seconds Pentium 4 1.7Ghz 384RDRAM WinME 063 seconds Pentium 4 1.9 Ghz 1Gb RAM Win XP 057 seconds Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 067 seconds AMD XP 1800+ 1 GB DDR Windows 2000 Pro 068 seconds Pentium 3 1 Ghz 256Mb Ram, Win 98, 070 seconds. AMD 1700+ (Dual) 1Gb DDR Win XP Pro 073 seconds Pentium 3 850 Ghz 512 Mb RAM Win 98se 081 seconds Pentium 3 1GHz, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP Home 081 seconds. AMD 800 Mhz Athlon 768Mb Ram Win XP Pro 085 seconds Pentium 4 1.0 Ghz ? ? 090 seconds Pentium Celeron 600 Mhz 256 Mb RAM Win 2000 Pro 095 seconds Celeron 700mhz 128 MB RAM Win XP 105 seconds AMD 1.0 Ghz Athlon 768Mb RAM Win XP Pro 106 seconds AMD 1..0 Ghz Athelon 512 MB RAM Win98SE 107 seconds AMD 1Gb Athlon, 256Mb Ram, Win 98. 108 seconds AMD ? K6 146 Mb RAM 115 seconds Pentium 3 800MHz, 128MB RAM, Win98 134 seconds Pentium III 500Mhz, 384mb RAM, Win98SE 165 seconds Pentium 3- 525Mhz 256 Mb RAM, Win 98 178 seconds Mac G3-500 Mhz 768 Mb RAM ? 215 seconds Mac G3-400 Mhz 256 Mb RAM O.S. 9.0.4, 343 seconds Mac G4 500 Mhz 832 Mb RAM O,S. 9.2.2 476 seconds iMac G3 233Mhz/ 160mb RAM OS9.2 615 seconds

Those are some pretty ancient Macs, I'd like to try this comparison on My new G4 dp 1ghz machine, but I do agree that Poser does not seem to be a whole lot faster on my Mac than on my old AMD 1ghz Athelon PC running win 2000. There seems to be a lot bigger gap in apps like Photoshop and Electric Image Universe. Just depends on how the program utilizes the resources available I guess.

also, wolf, I had an idea that you could also probably work with. It would be to create a hybrid of a typical p4 hair model, like those Daz makes, and integrate it with your strands. I.e. only make some areas of the hair strand based. The base of the hair would be a regular model, but some bangs and such could be strands. This would reduct polygon count, and possibly even have a better effect. Also, integrating transmaps with this too could produce an awesome hair product.

Yes,
im already looking at making solid a base wig to color the scalp with a thin layer of strands on the upper
level to react to my lighting.
i am also trying the powerful polygon reduction feature
of Cinema which can reduce poly counts by as much
as 70 percent while maintaining a decent amout of mesh quality.

I will keep at it
and THANKS for your encouragement ( and Iron Bear's) on this project
:-)