Quote - Just letting you know: The problem with the eyebrow causing problems with the dynamic hair is fixed in SR3.1 and is available now at the Smith Micro site

 

That's awesome!

What LaurieA said!

I ran into the same problem with my hoodie, with the hood in the back, due to the facing of the polys. However, if you check "normals forward" in the materials, you should get better lighting.

Thanks for the link EnglishBob. :) I have Joe Bushido's hair and used it for inspiration. I found that I got pretty good results with the ears by having thick strips that cover the whole thing, the worst part seems to be when they get tangled in and behind them. Proxys is a really cool idea, and would probably work really well with hair that needs to be more styled. I saw a dynamic witch dress somewhere in the MP that uses prop underneath to make it wider.

Alright, the hair is uploaded!  When it's approved, I think I'll start a new thread where we can discuss dynamic cloth hairs in general rather than the particular problem that started this thread!

This picture below shows the dynamic hair over the figure I have been testing with. She is much more full figured than V4 with standard morphs. She uses custom breast morphs (NGM and NBM), plus a loose, dynamic shirt. The hair drapes flawlessly over both the figure and the clothing. I really want to see more of this stuff. I would definitely pay for good dynamic cloth hairs, myself. :)

I think I'll probably add an optional forehead bangs prop to this hair, then I am going to move on and see if I can make a pony tail.

There are probably other improvements that can be done too, especially to trans maps and displacements. It's the first hair I've ever done, so there's a ton to learn, I'm sure. I am going to set up the props, a decent readme and a couple of textures/colors and hopefully put it up on freestuff by the end of this weekend.

I don't have a good shine yet, so I won't include that, but I'd love to see what kind of modifications and improvents other people could make with it!

For making stills, it's probably a good idea to do some post work, as someone mentioned. Are there any good guides or tutorials on how to do postwork on hair? I'd love to see that. :)

Yeah I need to rethink a few things with the layers and see what happens. One thing that could make them different, would be to roll and rotate the big strips a bit, that would alter their drape. We'll see!

1. All the layers, even though the lower ones start further down on the head, tends to simulate at very similar places, so the hair gets thinner than I want. It would be nice if the innermost layer would actually look like it's closer to the head/shoulder..  I don't know what settings that could solve that in the cloth room, or if I should model the inner layers a bit differently?

2. The second thing is that get sharp shadows and "stringy" looking bits, Do the trans maps need to be stronger, or am I missing something else? If I ad some shine, it gets worse.

It's getting close now, just need to figure out these more subtle issues to really get the final touch!

Quote - Oh!  And the one thing that is useful in terms of controlling specular value on hair is the the trans map.  You don't want shine where there's not supposed to be mesh.

Ugh, yeah that would not be pretty!

Those look great too!

If it's alright with you, I'll play around with the materials in that post you linked to get a good starting material for the hair?

Those are some really nice highlights!

Quote - 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. 

Huh, didn't realize it worked like that. Well, that's pretty good and saves the bother to make specular maps. Shinyness can really differ in different hairs too, at least from what I get from reference pictures. Anything from matted barbarian hair to a conditioner commercial... I've used the material room mostly for clothing, and for altering existing hairs and skins to get the results I want.

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?

Glad you like it! Having a very busy week, so it's moving slowly. But I'm currently reworking the trans maps, and will then figure out the displacements and stray hair layer. I have absolutely no experience with hair shaders though, so I'll take any help I can get there.

So instead I am going completely with multiple cloth objects, that I can collide with one another (Or not, I am testing which works best)  Initial tests with displacements are going well. Although multiple layers will go through each other when I make waves. An alternative is to only let the top layers have the waves. Initial tests have shown that using displacement waves only for top layers seems to work best.

Another tricky area is the parting, near the forehead, getting that one to look good.

The hair texture and trans map needs some work too. It's my first hair model, so it's taking some work to get it right. But bit by bit I think we're getting somewhere!

Another thing I'd like to do is to make an extra layer that has loose "fly" strands, using displacements, to get a bit of that wild, dynamic look.

Currently I have 4 layers. They each begin lower and the top one start from the parting. That way it will actually appear thick when the head is turned rather than look like it all comes from the parting. This means 4 simulations in the cloth room. And a 5th if I use flying strands, too.

It's not as bad as it seams. Using hex triangles, the simulations go really, really fast even when each layer uses 9-12k polys.