Try using raytraced shadows and see if it comes out cleaner. Looks like an antialiasing problem.

Definitely let me know what you find out, Marque. Send me an IM if this thread gets burried. I'm pretty sure it's a lost cause, but maybe there's something we aren't thinking of that would correct this. As ynsaen pointed out, the dynamic hair algorhythm isn't currently meant for what we want to do with it, but you never know.

The hair room just plain sucks right now. One of the original reasons I got P5 was the hair room, but as it turns out, that's one of it's weakest points. I hate to keep mentioning 3dsMax, but there's a strand-based dynamic plugin for it called Shag Hair that's absolutely incredible. The LEARNING curve is a bit steep, but the main thing is it's collision detection works flawlessly. That's the only thing missing in P5. On the other hand, I simply LOVE P5's cloth room, and the material room is quickly proving to be extremely powerful. Now the face room - I tried it several times, with decent results. But here's the problem... I think Don's mesh is too limited to get the accurate morphs needed for excellent results. You can only push and pull the vertices in relatively limited ways, which only makes for less than satisfactory results. However, one thing I use it for is getting a BASE texture for a face, then use the resulting map output from the face room and fix it up in photoshop a little. Works good that way, but as far as making digital clones from a photo, it's not very useful.. the millenium faces would be versitile enough to come much closer than Don is capable of. I'm assumig that's really what the face room is meant for, right? Digital clones from a photo? Like FaceGen does.

"That's like saying, here have a glass of milk, oh, sorry. There was a hole in the glass and it's all gone." Exactly. There's no point to the dynamic hair if you can't use it in animation effectively. More than 90% of the time, you will not be using a windforce anyway. The dynamics should be optimized for gravity and character movement with a focus on collision detection where you can just simply define the character or parts of the character as a "deflector". I think Curious Labs sometimes forgets to focus on people who ANIMATE, and cater mostly to those who do only still images. Again, frustrating and disappointing. I'll give them credit for their cloth room and material room though, they did an excellent job there. But CL, if you are listening... more improvements for us animators in the future PLEASE!

You definitely changed my mind about some of the possibilities with Poser 5, stewer. I won't even have to open 3dsmax for most of my figure compositing work now. Excellent. ;-) That's one damn powerful material room, beyond the scope of what most people realize (including myself)!

Now THAT is a great workaround, stewer. That should work well for a lot of things I need to composit. Brilliant! Thanks for that.

Does it have to be a Poser render?

Let me know if you find out anything about this, but I'm thinking without a matte material of some kind or the ability to "occlude" objects from the render, it's impossible. Maybe there's a way to rig a matte material in the material room, but fully transparent objects don't receive shadows either.

Good solution, Marco, but it seems far to laborious a task to do if you're using it for animation (multiple frames). I hope the dynamic hair is something they improve on in version 6, because right now it's fairly useless to me. What good is the wind dynamic if strands can still intersect the figure, or if it takes longer to calculate than it does to render? I mean, for stills this is ok, because you can postwork the imperfections out... but for animation, it sucks. :-(

ynsaen, how do you cast shadows without a ground plane? I have "render shadows" enabled in firefly, but without something under the figure to cast a shadow on, it does not render the shadow of the figure. I see a representation of a shadow in the viewport, but when I render without a ground object, or some kind of plane to represent the ground, then it just renders the figure with no shadow cast.

To my knowledge, VRay is not part of 3ds max but costs additional $299 to $799. I have never used Vray (I don't own 3ds max), but I'd be very surprised if it were able to deliver displacements at speeds similar to a REYES renderer while still retaining it's raytracing speed. I can only gather information from web sites, and there I read things like " Displacement really is a hog on the system so it will require a healthy dose of.. patience." Yes, it does tax the system a bit. Using GI with micropoly displacement will slow down the initial calculation, but by saving the irradience map to a file and reusing it, it can help speed things up for animations. I haven't noticed a drastic speed decrease when using displacement without GI. Also, Vray is an additional purchase, but MentalRay is now shipped as part of 3dsMax. Anyway, getting back to Poser... when you save an animation as TIFF images, will it retain the alpha info for shadows as well as the objects themselves? And is there a way to do network rendering with Poser scenes? If so, then that would change the way I use the software, and would make me try it more for production purposes. I know you can't render the scene to elements (IE., seperate the specular, diffuse, and shadow channels into seperate render passes), but for compositing purposes, it would be convenient to have the shadow information retained in the alpha channel. Then again, it probably isn't possible, since Poser doesn't have matte surface materials, and MUST render the "ground" as an object in order to have shadows cast on it at all. What I need is the ability to cast shadows from a figure onto the "ground", but not render the ground, just the figure and shadow. In Max, all I have to do is apply a matte material to the ground, and then it accepts shadows and reflections, but will not render as an opaque object in the alpha channel, which allows me to composite the resulting render frames seamlessly into a video background.

"About rendering as targa - why not TIFF?" Because targa is more widely used by video editing software than the TIFF format, which some software do not like. Also, I can do automatic alpha channel seperation in targa format, and I don't think that's possible with Tiff (not positive about that). Will poser render a video as individual Tiff images rather than AVI?? Anyway, these are things I need as an animator that Poser simply doesn't have that I'm aware of.

"No, 3ds max is not a micropolygon renderer. 3ds displaces geometry only at its vertices, so if you want subpixel displacements you need to pass a huge number of polygons to the renderer, resulting in a very high RAM usage and slowdowns. Even more, you as the user have to take care of providing geometry that is fine enough by adding extra subdivision modifiers to your objects." You're incorrect Stewer. No offense, but you simply don't know about the micropoly features of Vray. Vray has a true micropoly displacement modifier that allows you to add a highly detailed and complex displacement map to very low-res models (even single-polygon planes) in 3dsMax to create complex displaced geometry only upon render, while never having to add a subdivision modifier to the object. And it renders incredibly fast. Vray's micropoly displacement modifier is considered one of the best in the biz. Brazil is coming out with their own version of this I hear, and Mental Ray has one as well that's pretty good. All of these are of course for 3dsMax, and do not depend on Max's standard displacement to work. In fact, you can combine it with Max displacement if you want.

As an additional note, One thing I did find during my search of this matter, is that you have to be certain no part of the hair is penetrating any of the areas of your figure BEFORE you run a calculation. However, I've tried doing this, and it still locked up during the draping calculations. Is there any way to be absolutely sure the hair isn't passing through the figure before running a calc? Or is it just a "trial and error" type thing?

This is the EXACT same question I was just about to post! LOL. Actually, I'm having the same problem, and did a search but turned up no answers to it. It simply does not work. No matter what you do, the hair seems to always pass through the figure, and unlike the cloth room, you can't specify any objects for the hair to collide against in the hair room. I'm running on a Pentium 4 2400, with 1 gig ram and over 200 gigs of hard drive space, yet every time I try to enable collisions in the hair room and in the pose room, I get a system lockup when calculating the hair draping. If it does actually calculate, it seems to not work correctly. So I'm assuming it's just useless. Very frustrating. I guess it's back to using Shag Hair calculations in 3ds for me. :-(