This may have been brought up before. I tried to search through the forum and have browsed about looking for a post but could find nothing. I've loaded Koz's WaveHair, downloaded from Digital Babes, into P5 and am having trans map issues. I noted too that other hair objects to not render properly. Having trouble with the Mehndi Hair (purchsed with the Mehndi Elf from DAZ) and a few other items. I'm wondering if there is a quick fix for this problem? Is there something I need to do in the material room? I do love Poser 5. The cloth room is great and I know that once I get to know the material room I'll really have a great tool here. Thanks for your time, Rance

Uncheck "Smooth polygons" and "Remove Backfacing Polygons" and see if that helps.

also check that all of yor hair layers have their falloff set to 0 for some reason everything gets set to .6 on load.

I rarely keep "Remove backfacing polygons" on, especially when working with the older P4 models with hair. So, I did NOT remove backfacing polygons in the above renders. I did notice that trans falloff gets set to 0.6 and lowering it 0.0 does make the hair look a little better around the edges but I still get the crop squares. I will try playing with Smooth polygons. Thanks, Rance PS: no one else out there working with WaveHair?

You'll also want to set the trans edges to 0 in the material settings and see how that goes.

This is a untextured render of the Wave hair. The problem is still there, it doesn't depend on any render settings or such...

I imported this model in Cinema 4D and looked at it. The problem is that every polygon of this objects exists two times. So, this is a bug in the model.
The original P4 render doesn't care, but the new render is offended. :P

PS: It looks like some other models (Mehndi Hair) have the same problem.

Maybe someone can write a little progam to remove duplicated (two-sided) polygons from obj's.

Wow, thanks MadYuri. I appreciate your post. Not sure what I am going to do now. I really liked the WaveHair and actually paid ($) for the Mehndi hair (and a few others in my library). I don't model much. Meanwhile the features in Poser 5 I am very happy with. Thanks again, Rance

I also noticed that the 'Depth Queing Shadows' didn't work very well, the Raytraced shadows work though. I hate Raytrace renders, they take toooo loooong :-(

"I rarely keep "Remove backfacing polygons" on, especially when working with the older P4 models with hair. So, I did NOT remove backfacing polygons in the above renders" Uhm... do that and the problem is solved ;). (ie. make sure the "Remove backfacing polygons" is checked).

Oh and btw... "You'll also want to set the trans edges to 0 in the material settings and see how that goes." ..I think depakotez meant to say set the Transparency Edge to 1, not 0. Basically, if you set the Edge to 1, the Falloff value is irrelevent and if you set Falloff to 0, the Edge value is irrelevent (on transmapped items), so you can do one or the other, or both. P4 only looked at the Transparency Max value when a transmap was used, so a lot of people didn't bother setting a Transparency Min (Edge) value.

The issue with the Wave hair doesn't goes away with or without "Remove backfacing polygons". This might be a problem with my Poser 5 install, it isn't very stable after all, but maybe those two-sided polygones are always a hindrance in Poser 5.

Really? Hmm... I guess I should have tried that before posting ;).

Hey Spakni, I DID try to keep 'Remove backfacing polygons' checked but that didn't seem to help. With the WedgeCut hair if you remove backfacing polygons you see large gaps where there should be the underside of the hair object. I've also played with trans edge values and am used to using the Trans Min and Max. I haven't gone through my entire library of hair but I'm pretty sure this problem comes up again and again. The Princess Hair (that long braided pony tail thing) also shows irregularities, Koz's WaveHair, Shorthair, Mehndi Elfhair. Strange that other Koz productions seem to work fine. I just always liked the WaveHair package. You can shorten it up and it clears the shoulders for almost any pose. I've tried UV mapper to fix the object and played with some of the settings in the material room and when I couldn't get it to render right thought to post here. I love reading the chains here anyway;) Thanks all, Rance

Rance01, I have recreated your setup and can only confirm that I also see the FF block-problem (same results as the pictures you posted).

I have experimented a bit and I get fairly good result when applying following for the hair material:

• Transparency edge: 0.1
• Transparancy falloff: 0.1
• Diffuse Color->Color Texture->Image mapped="Alpha"
  and following in Render Options:
• Check Smooth Polygons

Mind you, you can still see the sharp edges (the squares in the mesh on the top of the head) if you zoom too near, but from a distance (if you can see the whole Victoria figure) the edges are smooth.

I guess you could drop a mail to Koz with the screen shots and ask for his advice. I think if he could update the wave hair geometry with smoother edges the problem could be solved.

I will check out your suggestions gstorme. Thanks. I've been by Digital Babes (digitalbabes2.com) to see if there might be a P5 update. Probably the last thing on his mind. I think were I a creator of meshes and the like I would prefer to forge new ground. I don't know. So much to do and only one processor;) Thanks again, Rani

Make sure you set the fall off to zero for each part of the hair. I got anton's magik to work by doing that.

What's all the fuss? A little fooling around in the Materials room got me this (P5FF render).

I couldn't get the boxes to go away on the wave hair. What settings did you use doldridg?

Basically I just took it the way it loaded from my P4 directory, went into materials and set the specularity color to white (but left the texture node connected to it), set the transparency falloff to 0 (this is a MUST), then linked the displacement channel to the texture and dialled the amount down to about .15 or .2 and then rendered in Firefly, with poly smoothing off (important, it does weird things to certain geometries), remove backfacing polys off, cast shadows on (with raytracing shadows on for only the main bright light) and a gaussian filter of size 1. I find that using MAPPED shadows on just one light produces the most realistic shadowing... And it avoids a bug that exists with background nodes and raytraced shadows of foreground objects. But at the expense of more render time.

doldridg, what is the gaussian filter?

In Render Options there is a choice of three filters for the anti-aliasing. The box is just a plain pixel averager, but the gaussian tends to be less severe and I often raise the size to 2. The third one is a little different again. The watchword here is: experiment.

......doldridg is right in that displacement removes the rendering artifacts, but texture filtering is not necessary.

Here's the simplest material setting needed to overcome the rendering problems with Koz's WaveHair. Note that only a small amount of displacement is required.

I've no idea why this works but suspect it has something to do with the mesh construction. This method also works with Koz's ShortHair.

Ian

a small refinement, maybe: connect your specular color channel to transparency node. thus you'll get specularity only on actual texture and not on whole mash, i.e. also on transparent parts.

Yes, though it doesn't seem to hurt to leave it on the texture itself. One thing that helped on Koz'z short hair for me was to move the texture and spec to the alternate channels.