I have a number of transmapped hair sets, plus the poly-crazy Sassy Hair from Daz. Whenever I render using them, they always come out looking like they've been put through a meat grinder. Fried. Frazzled. Anti-Alaising doesn't help matters either. Of all the tutorials I've found on Poser rendering, I've never run across one for rendering hair to look like Digital Babes', or the product shots at DAZ. What am I doing wrong? Settings way off somewhere? I use the included hair MAT files...haven't messed with the material options. These things should work out of the box, right?

maybe posting a render of what the problem is may help a transmap with antialiasing should work fine

try Kozaburo's stuff at Digital Babes..even I get good results with it..;)

Sounds like he knows about Koz's hair, but can't get it to render well.

Ted, maybe you have to save the image at a higher resolution? When I use the P4 renderer, I noticed hair and other "busy" textures come out looking very noisy, unless I do a high-quality render and save it a fairly high resolution. Try rendering large, and saving as a TIF.

It really all depends on the source materials. There are some hair props that, no matter what you do, still wont render realistically because everything has been done with repeat patterns of a single overlay, giving the hair a repetitive, overly regular look. But there are others that come out looking great, because the source material has been worked to avoid regularity: the original wedge cut, actually, is one that looks good even close up. Koz's stuff is seriously great, but if you look at it, it's rare he breaks things down into multiple areas all using the same texture -- usually he builds the hair piece as a single prop and then very carefully constructs the texture and transparencies. I think that's one of the secrets to his success.

But here's the Wedge closeup, on a P4 guy render: even the strands look great -- if you compare it to the recently released Beret with Hair or Western Hat with Hair, there's really no contest. Sorry about the NVIATWAS pun, but it was for another site's NVIAT challenge, and I couldn't resist. (Edited to include model identification)

Message edited on: 11/10/2004 13:30

heh. Finally got the joke. I dunno...that'd make a great frontispiece for an article about a fantasy writer or the creator of an online RPG... or be a short story about a modern Zeus and Athena...