Quote - I'd love to see some of the renders of your materials! It would be nice to distribute this hair with some sort of shader. I gather that a shine/specular map should be made for that, too, or?

No problem!  I'll gather some together soon.

It depends on what you mean by that.  Hair isn't generally shiny in some places and not in others.  A map controlling specular value specifies exactly that, even though it's generally and completely inaccurately based on diffuse maps and has all sorts of surface detail where there's no difference in shininess of a material at all.  Highlights in hair are should be placed based on the shape of the mesh and the placement of the lights. 

I use textures to tint the color of the highlights, because they look more accurate with a bit of tint.  Technically, that shouldn't be necessary and SSS should take care of softening and spreading highlights.  In practice, I still find it helpful. 

I have a recent post with a decent quickie hair material.  If you don't use the reflection in it, you can use a broad specular node instead.  Just to say, I don't usually color my HSV nodes like that, and most of my materials have conservation of energy and other features built into them (and are scripted, for that matter).  I also use the Custom_Scatter node a bit differently in general.  But very dark hair can be a bit more work.  Anyway, I can send you that material if you're interested. 

I also have other example renders of my hair materials, if you're interested.  I usually postwork my hair, so you might want to see the originals.

I think it looks great.  I think this is just perfect for what polygon hair should do.  I'd love to learn more about how you made this.  My own thoughts about dynamic cloth hair have been more towards trying to figure out how to make cloth work like a soft body, like in a video I've seen of Hatsune Miku.  I didn't think I could get layers to work.  But you've done an excellent job here.  I'd love to see it in motion or upside down.  It seems exactly like what I'd love to use.

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.

I pretty much only use dynamic clothes.  I haven't made my own stockings (yet), but I had no problem at all converting Lady Littlefox's Infamous/Scandalous stockings to dynamic.  Just make sure they have good static and dynamic friction and that your figure is scaled down (say 90% overall and 75% on z) compared to the end state.  Oh, and that the stockings settings give it good stretch.  The default 50 is OK, but you can take it down further if it starts giving you problems.

Here's an example of me using dynamic stockings.  You can see how nicely they act over the toes.

No, that wouldn't necessarily be the solution to what I'm talking about, .  I'm not saying put self-collisions on.  I'm just saying that soft decoration follows whatever cloth is underneath it.  I don't know if it only follows the cloth that its next to when the sim starts or it follows whatever cloth its next to while simming.  If it's the latter, and the cloth underneath it gets tangled, it might cause the soft decorations to get confused.  No collisions would mean the cloth would overlap, which might cause the soft decorated groups to behave strangely.

That isn't to say that turning on self-collision would necesssarily stop overlapping.  I'm just saying that without self-collision it will almost definitely overlap, which might cause problems ofr the soft decorations. 

I have no clue what the solution to that would be, but I'd test first to find out.  Which I'd probably do by testing one set of layers. Basically, I'd separate the problem into layers and strands rather than both at once, just to narrow down the problem.

I'm just thinking.  If you have no self-collisions on, and soft decorated pieces follow the cloth underneath it, could the soft decorations get confused by other pieces of cloth?

Really impressive!

It didn't seem to work.  The documentation says that there's a way to do it, but I can't figure it out yet.

Oh, and as much as this requires a workaround, so do a lot of commercial dynamic cloaks.

Oh!  So if you add a head all by itself, it does work.  That's really good to know.  I was wondering.  OK.  I'm trying to get through some stuff, but I'll try the truncated actor trick soon.

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.

Quote - It's really strange.   It tends to work better in a bit older versions of Poser.  I just tested it in Poser 7, and it works fine, so like you are saying, it's probably fairly new. I recall it being problematic in P8/2010 as well.

It's ironic you say this, because I just refrained from commenting in the thread asking for release dates to say how relevant they are.  This is a prime example.  I know of some dynamic cloaks for V4.  Their promo renders wouldn't have been possible with this problem.  If we knew when they came out, we might be able to hazard a guess about P8/2010 without testing it there.

Edited to add: The sim using the imported obj didn't go very well, but it seemed to not go well in a correct fashion.  If that makes sense.  Trying something else...