Who here uses Carrara to create hair models for Poser characters? How do you do it? I've tried a couple of different methods, but am having problems getting the final models to come out right. For instance, I made a great hair model using cyliders created in the spline modeller for the hair. When I export it as an obj and map it, the texture maps come out just the way I want them to. Every strand of hair had the same material assigned to it, so I only had to take that material and remap it cylindrically to get a nice simple grid that I can easily use in the template for texture maps. Unfortunately, the spline model has an extremely high polygon count, making it unusable in Poser. I've tried reducing the surface fidelity during export, only to wind up with a low polygon count and a very blocky looking model.

I also have made a vertex based hair model, using long strips of polygons to create locks of hair (the onion skin method of creating hair). It exports nicely, very low polygon count, and it looks good. However, the texture mapping is a problem. UVMapper gives me a separate texture for each master object created in Carrara (all the strips created with a particular master object are listed as having their own material even though I assigned the same material to all the strips). And each individual strip of hair has to be remapped to so I can get all their maps to lie in a flat grid.

There's got to be a simpler way! What am I doing wrong? Does anybody have any ideas? I really would like to take the hair models I create in Carrara and use them in Poser, but I don't know how to get this to work with out a ridiculous amount of work. BTW, I am using Carrara 2.
Helen
www.pixelarcana.com

"all the strips created with a particular master object are listed as having their own material even though I assigned the same material to all the strips" If you import the hair.obj into Poser, you can re-assign the materials for each strip using the Group Editor. Then Poser can use the same material for all of them, after you spawn props, assign material and re-export the hair.obj. Going the other route (locks of hair or even strand-based hair) becomes of nightmare of polygon bloat, as you found out. That's one of the reasons the hair generated by Poser 5 looks so awful.

I've discovered I can also reassign the materials for each strip in UVMapper Pro. That still leaves me with the problem of having to remap each individual strip, though. In Carrara, when I assign a material to the parts of my hair models, I specifiy how I want the material to be mapped - cylindrical, planar, parametric, spherical, etc. If I'm using strips of polygons for the hair, I set the mapping to planar. Now, depending on whether I used the spline modeller or the vertex modeller, I get very different results when I export the hair model as an obj and take it into UVMapper. The spline modellers keep their mapping, and the UV map lays out in a nice neat grid. But the vertex model map comes out all twisted and I have to go back and remap each individual piece. I've noticed that even in Carrara, I'm having problems with the mapping. I tried making hair with cylinders. I made my cylinders in the vertex modeller by creating an oval shape and sweep it along a path. As long as my cylinder is straight up and down, the map follows the cylinder with no problem. Once I start curving and bending the cylinder, the map quits following the cylinder and gets warped. I'll try rendering an example of what I'm talking about tonight and post it here. Maybe that will help explain the problems I'm having.