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Poser - OFFICIAL F.A.Q (Last Updated: 2024 Dec 20 7:20 am)
Subject: Hair, collision control and animation, oh my.
The collision algorithm for strand based hair in poser 5 is not yet ready for full bore animation, imho. The collision rules are not "strong" enough -- bear in mind, I am a P5 nut, love it to death, but I also do not believe that the collision detection is on par with some of the plugins available out there. For what it is, however, it's very nice. But then, unlike some folks, I don't expect it to be absolutely perfect in an application that costs less than half the plugins that do similar effects. (and note, I don't call it dynamic hair). That said, strand based hair in animation places a huge processing burden on the system, since the bulk of the hairs are calculated at render time (if the hair is made well), with only a few guide hairs showing otherwise. The effect, though, especially when combined with careful manipulation of the position splines for the hair (you do have to style it across frames) and the wave, magnet, and windforce effects, you can get some really killer looks. Cost: time. strandbased hair will take roughly twice the time to render versus helmet hair, and proper use of it requires a great deal of manipulation of it. Verrah scary stuff ;)
thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)
OK now that you are getting into serious animation its time to seriously cull your artistic vision and start to optimize ;-) first and foremost FORGET about animated hair in poser 5 its nice that they gave poser that feature but this is a classic example of a third party solution having been crowbarred into posers aging core. most have found that the collison engine fails very quickly in animations of any length. and the render times will be astronomical on a single CPU I use Shave&haircut for Cinema4DXL 8.5 a truly modern optimized program and most of us dont even attempt lengthy animations with hair collisions and even if you do succeed it will likely create a new level of that "flickering" issue in the final renders. to give you some perspective Square pictures had a render farm of 800!!! silicon graphics workstations for the "final fantasy TSW" movie saved Scene files with Aki ross's silky wind blown hair still took 2 hours just to open for editing.!!!! and over 4 hour per frame in a separate pass . render times so ponderous that they actually consideerd altering the script to give her a cropped "prison haircut" after her arrest by "general hein." Dont torture your self and end up discouraged. if you must have somewhat flowing female hair get some of the more higher quality transmapped hair props that have morphs such as "blowback,sway left,right "etc. and animate the morphs manually in the graph editor.
Wait for Kirwyn's tutorial. It's supposed to be ready soon. He's managed to do some nice animation with dynamic hair. You do have to watch your resources. The P5 hairstyles that come with P5 are way too high-res. There's no need for them to be that high-res, really. Few polys in the skullcap, fewer vertices in the strands, and it would look just as good.
So I guess I'd say...no, P5 cannot animate complex hair. But you may not need hair as complex as you think.
your right stewer iwas mistakenly thinking of "Size8" software who did p5 's cloth engine. nevertheless I STILL believe its more practical to animate morphs on transmapped hair than waiting for poser to calculate hair collisions
no no no, not dynamic strand by strand hair, or Poser Hair Room Hair...just (what wolf359 finally got down to) animating some of the 'group' morphs of a package of hair, that's all. Sorry I caused confusion by not being specific in my first post.
LOL, I "created" some hair room strand-based short cuts and tried to animate...BELIEVE ME, i gave up that idea a long time ago.
And I believe they had 1000 cpus on FFTSW and in the interview with the director I read, he said the overall average render budget was 90 minutes per frame. Aki was in almost every scene.
What I am talking about is a package...Bliss Vision Hair by danae (I am awaiting a response from danae about this) but it is not that specific package...it's the collision avaoidance system itself -- on any hair figure.
I have already made a very beautiful short animation with this hair flying around. The render time hit is about 1.5 minutes per frame over shorter, low res hair, but worth it in certain circumstances.
:::: Opera :::::
Message edited on: 01/12/2005 11:21
nevertheless I STILL believe its more practical to animate morphs on transmapped hair than waiting for poser to calculate hair collisions Yes, I also think that in many situations it's more practical to animate hair by hand than using simulation. It's more controllable, it always does what you want. Note that it's also possible to animate strand-based hair in P5, using magnets and wave deformers.
Content Advisory! This message contains violence
Attached Link: MY ABANDONDED FILM PROJECT
hey opera here is some (NOT very good !!)hand animated hair at the end of this"trailer"
from one of my long abandoned poser film projects
from 2 years ago.
Attached Link: hair movement test
Since we're on the subject, here's a test animation of moving hair. Just a head/hair shot and no object collision, but plenty of movement. Zipped file is 11.6Mb.
Animate conforming hair using the graph editor? My head is starting to hurt. Really, it is much simple to use the dynamic hair in Poser 5. I would, perhaps, prefer "Maya Unlimited" for the hair dynamics but never could afford shelling out 7000 dollars. As randym77 kindly pointed out, I have a tutorial in the works and some pre-built hair to go along. This is "real" dynamic hair......hair that moves and collides with the figure, with highlights that move with the changing light. Simulation is very fast and it only takes ONE. How fast? I have done a 120 frame walk-in-place walk cycle in 45 seconds. It took just over 12 minutes to do a 1046 frame dance sequence. And this hair is over shoulder-length long. If one animates full-body, the hair does little, in my opinion, to slow down render times. If we want close-up head shots, then render times will be considerably longer. I know it's hard to believe that P5 hair can be easy, fast, and effective but unless the "creek rises" so to speak; doubters beware....the proof is coming.
Wolf359 that's a strong teaser for your movie. I like the jump up, the explosion and some of flat-top's expressions. That hair animation at the end, is that poser? Hairroom dynamic hair? Hey, you still have 107 years to go before your film is not a flashback! Have you stopped working on it? ::::: Opera ::::
Content Advisory! This message contains nudity
Attached Link: Hair Dept.
*"Wolf359 that's a strong teaser for your movie. I like the jump up, the explosion and some of flat-top's expressions. That hair animation at the end, is that poser? Hairroom dynamic hair? Hey, you still have 107 years to go before your film is not a flashback! Have you stopped working on it?" *Yeah' its long abandoned
but ive spent the last 2.5 years
honing my skills and aquiring the kinds of content
and sci fi set peices that i really want for an animated short But as I lamented in another thread my biggest obstacle is voice audio.
im not willing to pay anyone for a personal film project
and being the "lone wolf" type,
I frankly dont know any reliable people that can provide voice work.
BTW the hair was done with a free plugin called "hair dept" its for Cinem4dXL where i render ALL of poser animations.
I only use posers render for previsualization.
[Wipe drool off chin] [Inhale] [Hold it]
Verbosity: Profusely promulgating Graham's number epics of complete and utter verbiage by the metric monkey barrel.
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Is collision control useful at all for animation, with complex hair involved? I am just trying to get perspective on how long it takes collision avoidance to execute. I loaded a complex long hair figure on a simple P5 model Judy (no Daz involved here at all) after having made sure collision detection was toggled on for every element of the hair AND Judy. But when I moved the two figures close together, Poser5 gacked big time. Frozen hour glass. I gave up after 5 minutes or so. It may not have been completely frozen, but...really...is this a practical tool? I love this long hair. It is fantastic. But I can't have it adding hours to each frame of an animation. Anyone with experience, reply if you can. Perhpas I am applying the tool incorrectly. Perhaps the work flow is to turn collision DETECTION on (as opposed to avoidance), then step thru each frame of an animation and visit the frames that display collision and hand-fix the problem. (NOTE: When I had simple detection on, I noticed this hair was detecting collision with itself! That would have to add to the burden when actual avoidance is turned on.) ::::: Opera :::::