Yeah, I think I knew you could convert Blender hair to mesh and use it in Poser. But for me, that defeats the purpose, because then you lose the look of real strand-based hair.

Since it's Poser's styling tools that are such a problem, I don't think I'd personally be all that interested in exporting from the hair room to Blender.

Exporting from Blender to Poser's Hair Room, on the other hand ... I wish that could be done. That's the one transference I could see myself using. But I doubt the capability exists.

Same newbie hair in Blender with just a few more minutes' work and an HDRI environment thrown on. (Incidentally, 1920x1080 render took roughly 8 1/2 minutes.) Dang, I want this capability in Poser....

Dang, that's very well-priced. If I continue to dig into Blender, I may well invest in that.

Heh. Thought I'd see how difficult Blender's particle tools are. Keep in mind that I don't know my way around Blender AT ALL (as you can tell by the fact I don't even have the eyes right) -- just struggled my way through the first few parts of BlenderGuru's donut tutorial last night to get my feet wet. This style is really bad, but given it's the first time I've played with it, I can definitely see the potential. The tools definitely make more sense than the ones in the Hair Room. (Also rendered really fast — 4:04. No noise in the hair after a couple minutes. Granted there's nothing in the scene, but all there is the Poser scene above is an HDRI. I certainly couldn't get that quality of hair render out of P11 that fast, although I know the Cycles version of P12 is a big leap faster.

Here's the blonde version I mentioned. There are a few modifications already here, but not nearly what I ended up with.

As you can see, the bangs were kind of floating once I dialled in the kinks. I like the way the material looks, though.

Honestly, I may have been better off just starting over from scratch with the bangs, as I'm not really satisfied with them in any version. I'll probably still do that.

Oops. The image ended up in the middle of the text. Sorry about that....

See here:

https://www.posersoftware.com/article/538/poser-update-poser-120703-improves-usability-and-material-room-performance

Supposedly, it's in the development pipeline: "Latest Cyles updates and support for Cycles X Viewport"

Material shader setup for the Flip-Flop metallic car paint.  A simple arrangement.

perpetualrevision posted at 4:45 PM Wed, 30 March 2022 - #4436575

That one stumped me too, how to get that "do you want to save it as a smart prop" prompt. And the solution turned out to be to save the item to the library WITHOUT first selecting it from a dropdown menu. I would typically use a dropdown or whatever means to make sure I was saving only the item I wanted to save, but you don't get the prompt that way. So just make sure the intended item is selected in your scene, click to add it to the props library, and you should get that message. (I'm guessing it works the same when saving to the hair library, but hair is just a special kind of prop, so either library should work.)

As for the skull cap that won't move, did you double check that the parameter settings have the min limit as a negative number (and the max limit as a positive number)? That one's tripped me up before.

Also: is the skullcap coming from embedded geometry (geometry coordinates left in the library file) or from a reference to an external OBJ? Sometimes embedded geometry can cause problems, so I use Netherworks' Creator's Toybox to extract external OBJs from embedded geometry in both items I've made and items from others. 

One final thought that's more of a question, I guess: do you need to use a skull cap to use dynamic hair on V4? Is the idea that using a skull cap lets you more easily save just the hair? I used dynamic hair on the HW Horse to make a fuzzy Fjord, and I created the hair groups right on the figure (no "skull cap" needed). I saved the whole horse to the library and it loads into new scenes just fine. 

As noted above, I've already checked the parameter settings.

Personally, my guess is that something happened when I created the skullcap. I did it the way the Poser manual has historically said to it for non-distributable hair, i.e. spawning a prop from a group I created on V4's head.

Certainly, you do not *need* to use a skullcap; you can grow the hair directly on the head. But you lose a ton of flexibility that way. You're bound to always loading the same character if you want to use the hair, and you can't transfer it to another figure. It just makes a whole lot more sense to use a skullcap.

I actually used 3Dream's Master Skull Cap recently, but for various reasons I wanted to try it the "old way."

I used to have good luck with PhilC's skullcap, but unfortunately my main 3D hard drive got wiped clean and I lost pretty much everything (including a whole bunch of original work), and he's no longer in business, so I can't just redownload it like I did with stuff from Daz, Rendo, and ShareCG.

Hm. As I write this, I just realized that I redownloaded one of my own hair props from ShareCG. I bet that has PhilC's skullcap — he had it as redistributable.

...

Thanks, Y-Phil. The settings did look odd (-860,000 and +860,000), but changing the numbers to 200 didn't help, even when trying to move 200 in one goes. The prop stays in the same place. Anyway, the hair strand props had the same settings, and they move fine.

I think I'm probably going to have to give up on this one, and go back to using other people's skullcaps. I tried reparenting the hair pieces to 3Dream's MSC, but then the hair room no longer recognized it and it only renders the basic strands.

Well, I still don't know what's going on. I altered the hr file in a text editor, as advised. The skullcap prop is not locked, and it claims to be parented. But it's not loading on the head or even close to it, and won't move. The hair room groups will move via translate, but the skullcap thinks it belongs in the middle of nowhere and won't budge.

RedPhantom: Thanks, I'll doublecheck that, although I think I looked at it before.

primorge: thanks for the text editing info. I will try that. I certainly know how to parent; I've been using Poser since 2008. :) As I said, it was parented when I saved it, and I reparented it after loading. Interestingly, I don't think I've ever been prompted to save something as a smartprop, so far as I can recall.

Sunfire: Thank you for trying to help, but your advice is incorrect. Neither hair room hair nor underlying skullcaps have anything to do with the cloth room; and I have used hair room hair without running a sim hundreds of times. I don't particularly use it for the dynamics; I use it because I prefer the look of strand-based hair (and the flexibility and challenge of creating my own without being a modeler).

I should add that one thing I tried was deleting a line I found in the pp2 that identified the parent as universe, but that didn't seem to do anything at all.

Yes. My hair shader system is coming soon. Thank you!