Quote - Very interesting, as well as frustrating.  That rather explains part of an experience I had with a dynamic necklace lately.

You don't care about self-collision, right?  Then you can do waves in your displacement.   If you have nice simple flat mapping, like most hair, you can even make your waves procedural.  If you've given your strips several maps (7 or so seems to be the norm), you can even offset them a little so that you automatically have waves that are a bit individual to each strip.  I'm sure there's a way to get the waves to vary in size randomly. 

If you want, if you send me this latest version, I could take a whack at it.  I'm pretty good at materials in general, and I've spent a lot of time on hair.  I've been using my own hair materials and my own diffuse hair texture (blonde- I just adjust that one texture to get the color I want) for several years now.  My latest hair idea involves SSS and (optionally) reflection.  Soft reflections with Fresnel can really help a lot, if the hair mesh is simple enough to render transmapped reflections without taking a millenium.

By correcting the bottom of the soft strips, they are starting to behave better, one by one!  Funny that you are talking about displacements, I was thinking too of adding some of that to the top layer.  My texture is currently made with waves, including the trans map. If you give me a day or two to get this part wrapped up and cleaned up, I'll send you the hair!

I'd love to see what you can do with it, and how you think. Especially if I get a chance to learn more about materials in the process.

Now, if I make the distance greater anywhere else, not close to a edge, the whole thing works just fine. It doesn't seem to get problematic later on in the sim either, even if layers overlap and such. As long as it "connects" right at the beginning of the sim, it works fine later.

Unless there's a workaround for this, the only way to do decorated strips is to keep them close enough to the underlying fabric, and if waves are needed, make sure the edges don't lift up too much.. Could always make it curl out towards the bottom, then connect back again, closer, and use trans maps. It's a bit more complicated, but would probably work.

Hmm, just tried that. With just one piece with decorated hairs, and nothing else. Self collision on/off. Same thing happens.  In the simulation it looks like the soft decorated group starts shifting a bit, then the dynamic group tries to follow it, and the decorated tries to follow that etc.  If I set a really long simulation time, the hair has pretty much wrapped itself into a crazy mess of knots.

I've seen soft decorated groups go out of sync before, like falling through the clothing and not matching, but this.. this is just weird. Right on par with the eyebrow thing!

The attached picture shows what happens after simulating for 300 frames. It doesn't stop moving, but just keep rolling itself up more and more

I thought the soft decorated group was just supposed to follow the dynamics, and that the dynamics would not try to interact with the soft decorated group? Even though it looks like it is, in this scenario. It even happens if I just run a drape.

Has anyone ran into anything similar?

Meanwhile I am going to explore different venues of multiple dynamic layers.

It's a a simulation and it actually has volume which is really neat!

I'm making two hair props. One has the lower layer, that starts at ear level and goes down. The thick strands are "sown" together, creating more like a loose cap than strands, giving the hair completeness.  Then I am making another prop on top of it that starts from the parting on top of the head. This will collide with V4 and the underlaying prop. I haven't added any soft decorated strands yet, but I think it could work!

The clothroom likes separate props layered on each other much better than self collision, probably for obvious reasons, since the self collision will have a harder time deciding what goes on top. 2, or even 3 separate props and the top one having soft decorated groups for styling and thickness really could be something. They are layering as they should. Now it's just a matter of refining everything and getting it right. 

MD really is nice for making those strips! They are automatically made as hex triangles, and the strip comes unwrapped straight, easy to texture. They just need to be organized a bit. The screenshot shows with and without test texture, and no transmaps.

Quote - Ah!  That makes sense as a problem.  It was bothering me that it was a problem with the figure and not the prop, even when the figure was completely different.  I'm so glad you guys figured it out!

I think your hair solution depends a lot on your end goal.  For me, hair is a basis more than a finished step.  I have a hair shader I'm pretty happy with at the moment, and I've always used hair that I can pose well.  But the only purely realistic hair I've seen has been custom made for a still, taken from a photo, or painted.  Including pro level dynamic hair.  So for me, as long as it's not in the entirely wrong place or doing something so wrong I need to do a lot of fixing, I really don't care.  For me, a simple hair mesh that worked sort of like a softbody would be preferable to something that was strandy but full of errors. 

Also, I'm pretty sure I've seen someone at CG Society show off dynamic hair styles as theirs that were hair that followed some top Poser hair meshes, including some Kozaburo ones.  If you could use your cloth hair to do for strand hair what skull caps do for regular mesh hair, as well as serving as some sort of guide, that would be really powerful.  I think a lot of what makes dynamic hair so scary is styling.  If it was possible to do a basic style with mesh, get strands to follow each piece, and then just run the dynamics, that might make dynamic hair more usable.

My end goal has for some time to have nice, long wavy hair that doesn't need so much adjusting for a custom figure. My female characters are often more bigger and full bodied, with a ton of morphs, which makes working with conforming hairs challenging. It takes so many rounds with the morph tool and magnets to get them to fit, and then if I move the character in leaning pose, the hair still hangs at the wrong angles.  It -is- doable with a lot of work for stills, but if I want animations or a more "in movement" pose, it's frustrating.

I'd like to get a nice, rich long hair that also gives the illusion of thickness. That's why I am playing around a lot with soft decorated groups.

I am pondering if having fewer layers of dynamic hairs, more like one or two big elements (easier to style too), and then a ton of soft decorated strands over it may do the trick.

The problem with multiple dynamic layers is when they go into each other, some intersects just look really bad in render.

Another type of hair I want to make is a version of the same long hair tied up in a pony tail. I gather this is much easier. All I need is a dynamic tail, with a ton of soft decorated hairs layered over it, should do the trick.

With hex triangles, poly count and simulation speed doesn't seem to be much of an issue any more, so the main challenge is to get the styling and layers work right.

Quote -  

Okay, this is what i've got....(nudity in animation)

http://jrdonohue.com/clothhair3.mp4

I don't seem to have the (eybrow?) bug.

So, what shader/maps to I put on this, and I wonder if it will look like hair in animation if I do.

It would be great, because the simulation churns at about 2-3 seconds per frame, even with collision.

Any suggestions for making it look like hair?

::::: Opera :::::

 [edited to add: I am not colliding against "head" because it was not giving good results because of ears. So, i have a very low res proxy (you can't see it) parented to the head, and the prop parented to the proxy. you may see a little "whoops' with the nose, that's because I carelessly did not ease the nose inside the proxy!]

 

Looks like you have a similar approach like the one I have. A skullcap and then strands attached to the top.

I'm also working on having layers underneath too, so all the hair doesn't come from the top of the head.  The difficulty seems to lay in getting the thickness right. I thino that soft decorated layers is the key, but I haven't quite figured it out yet. Hair props have a long turn around time, it takes a while to make something before testing. :)

As far as making it look like hair, hair textures with trans maps is probably the way to go, (Unless you are really good with the material room)  that's what I'm doing. There is a ton of hair resources around.

Quote - Im soo glad i found this thread, im currently also making a dynamic cloth hair,but ive paused to perfect my hair shader that currently works with most transmapped hair. my aim is to make dynamic cloth hair that is 100% node based with no images,including no transparency maps,(this shader does currently exist but is being tweeked).im also putting in a few little tricks which im keeping under my hat for the moment.....i will post info on my dynamic cloth hair if people want when im back in the cloth room.....oh and dont try windforce with the hair in sr3 it is also broken, you have to use a pre sr3 poser 2012/9  or an earlier version of poser

Looking forward to see what you come up with!

My biggest challenge right now is to figure out how to give hair thickness without getting weird render artifacts that come when the dynamic segments intersect each other. I am pondering if I should make a lot of small strands, or maybe a single big like hood for the main style with just soft decorated segments over it. A lot of thick layered hair segments doesn't work so well at the moment.

It may be possible to use more than one hair prop though? Self collision usually doesn't work nearly as well as layers of clothing.

Quote - One suggestion. Parent the hair to the head and exclude the cap from both constraint and dynamic. It makes draping faster and avoids some crumbling effects if it does not fit 100%

 

That's a really good idea!

Quote - Yes, send it in. Please do as soon as possible.

Do you have a texture or template for the hair?

Responding to the ticket now!

I just corrected the UV maps in the latest version, the one I sent didn't have much work there, and has some UVs all over the place. Just starting this, it's our first hair. Got some photosources to work with. Done a ton of dynamic clothes, so I understand the basics of hair, too.

One issue is when the dynamic hair intersects with itself, creating render artifacts. The one to the right has no soft decorated group, only a bunch of cloth segments. The one to the left has a soft decorated group over it, a first layer of thickness which does look a bit better! 

If I have too many layers, they may cut into each other, if I have too few, they may create too many gaps. There's also the issue of when the character tilts her head. More than one layer is kinda necessary, like up at the top, some that begins down at the ear and so on, otherwise she will look very bald underneath when she moves her head in any unusual position. The textures is a first rough, just to get a general feel how it works, with a really rough trans map too.

I know it has a ton of potential, just need a smart method to do it.

I had my project up just now, so tested right away. Making the eyebrow visible and running the simulation did the trick, very funny bug to be sure!

Well, now it's at least possible to make this hair, even though it needs some special treatment in the clothroom!  Maybe it's possible to get this issue fixed in the next version of poser, since we know what it is.

I still have the ticket open with SM, so I can send this information to it, so they have it.