I was playing around last night, setting up Judy to try importing into TS. When I brought her in her hair was there, never managed that before. It doesnt look to good, but its a start. The only thing I did different this time was to use the "recalculate dynamics" on the hair, I wanted it to look slicker, as she is in the shower...

As I said it doesnt look to good. And another problem are the creases that have appeared on Judy.. Anyone any ideas how to get rid of them? I have anoth pic rendered in POVray, but I left that one at home.... silly boy...

Looks like some poor normals. A "smoothing" function such as normal recalculation in 3D-Win ought to be able to clear that up. Alternatively search the POV-Ray newsgroup for comments about a Sub-Surface utility...the author was planning to update it for UV-Mapping once POV supported UV-Mapping "natively" so maybe he has...tha tought to improve the smoothness too, perhaps...

That's not dynamic hair, is it? I thought those could not be exported. If it's transmapped hair, then you can make it look much better by loading the transparency map in the Material Editor inside trueSpace. Actually, I think the hair looks pretty good, and with some postwork it could be made even better. As for the creases, load Judy's skin texture, then click on the "AutoFacet" icon in the Material Editor, hold down the button, and then choose "Smooth". Now re-apply the texture to the figure with this smoother texture. Or, right-click on the "AutoFacet" icon, and this will bring up a little window where you can manually enter a smoothing angle. Increase that to a much higher number (somewhere between 80-120). Now re-apply the texture. Hopefully this will solve the crease problem. If you need some screenshots, let me know and I'll put them together. I hope this helps! Sue

Yea it is dynamic hair, created in the hair room. As I say the only thing I did different for the export to work is run through the "animation; dynamics; recalc all hair". I thought it wouldnt export either, but it must generate a mesh when it recalcs the dynamics. I plan to experiment again tonight, so if I get anywhere I will post another pic. Gary H

Hmm, that's very interesting, I'll have to try this, too! Good luck with your experiments! I think the smoothing of the texture inside trueSpace, like I described it, should help with Judy's body.

Thanxs for th hints on Truespace. Im fairly new at 3d rendering, most of my past experiance has been with CAD, a totally different world ! I have TS5, poser 4 & 5, cinema 4d 5.3, vue 4 and animation master...... so not short of a few progs to play with.. and a friend has offered to buy me softimage... To little time and too much curiousity, I should be out clearing the septic tank! But the computer keeps calling to me...

LOL, I know what you mean! I should be doing other stuff but I'm still stitting here... With all those great programs, I'm not surprised that you find it hard to get away from the computer. I got the training CD from Softimage but I haven't really had time to look at it much. What I have seen so far, though, has been amazing.

Ive played with it in his office, but I dont think I "need" it... its way to complicated for my play time.. I cant figure out AM at all, love Vue, starting to get the hang of TS... but I still go back to the good old POVray for most of my stuff; Im a coder at heart... have been for my 20 odd working years. This 3d stuff is one of the "fun" things I do to try and stay sane (Vainly some would say!) Anyway, Im off to play with the hair again, if I get anywhere I will post another pic.

Intrigued ... if this recalculate hair works ... perhaps it could work to export to Bryce as well. Hmmmm. Boni

Could we have a few more details on what you did to the hair. I just tried this (recalc dynamics) and imported the figure and hair obj into both Bryce 5 and trueSpace 6 and only got the skullcap.

There is no way that is dynamic hair. P5 hair is strand based, that block on her head sure doesnt look like any strands to me. Looks like a helmet with a hair texture on it.

Okay, I think I figured out what's going on: Gary, you used a hair, probably the HMann-FmBlondie hair from the library, which consists of a transmapped hair mesh and some dynamic hair on top of this mesh. So, when you exported the hair, you probably exported it as an .obj file, and the transmapped hair mesh got transferred fine, but the dynamic hair didn't. If you want to use that hair in your scene, you can load the transparency map for it inside trueSpace (go to the Textures folder, then Props, then hmann textures if I remember correctly).

I found that if I export the hair as a .3ds file, the results will be different: the .3ds file will include a mesh for the dynamic hair part, but it will not be thin strands; it will be made out of thicker pieces. In the attached picture the hair on the left is a .3ds file imported into trueSpace, and the hair on the right is the .obj file (from the back, so you can see that it seems like it's the same hair that you used). In the .3ds object, I painted the transmapped hair plain yellow and the dynamic hair pieces plain brown, so you can see the different parts.

In a way this might actually be useful: I guess one could export the dynamic hair as a .3ds file, then make a texture and transparency map for it and use it as a transmapped hair in other programs.

Ah.... looks like you have cracked it Sue88... I had been playing around for several hours, and coulcnt remember exactly how Id got to that point. I couldnt recreate it either with pure dynamic hair. Sorry every one for getting you all excited. But still has possibilities, I hope. Gary H

I think it could have possibilities for hairmakers and texturers: they could make a dynamic hair in P5, export it as a .3ds object, change it into an .obj file, open it and make the UV map for it in UVMapper, then make a texture and transmap for it in a paint program. It would be like transmapped hair, but maybe it would look a little more realistic since it would be made up of many smaller pieces of mesh. The texturing might not be very easy though, I don't know. But I do think it has a big potential. I wonder what others would think of this? I'm glad you showed this, at least I learnt something new and interesting. :) Sorry it didn't work for you, but at least you can use the transmapped hair part in your scene. If you are in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving; if not, then have a nice day! :) Sue