Jessi Is Too Blonde
An Animation.

Hair. Can't make a movie without it.
Can't wrestle it to the ground.

In the movie Final Fantasy, the 50,000
strand hair for Aki Ross was said to
consume 60% of the entire movie's render
budget. The filmmaker's seriously considered
having the bad guys cut her hair short
when she was captured half way thru...and good riddance.

In Poser 6, strand hair has reached an interesting level
of power in this great little program. The hair 'props'
included are not the scraggly, crinky, thin thin thin
efforts we have seen before. Nope. This is a serious implementation.

This is a test animation of Jessi with strand hair gone wild.
Women WILL flip their hair, you know.

Link: Right-click here and download.
8.2 MB Quicktime.

I decided to see if there are possibilities to shoot strand
hair close in, to see if the effect works.

My verdict: This specific animation 'does not work' in the
sense that I would never put it in a film. The hair flows
and falls, but it still does not convey natural movement
to me. But...the potential is evident. I would need to learn
more about the gravity, springiness, elasticitcy and air damp
controls. Frankly, I could spend weeks with those controls just
taking this raw feature and seeing if it could be tamed in a close
up. (I think it is already effective in a long shot)

Also, the materials effecting the appearance.....
I think most strand hair (including what I saw in the
commercial movie 'The Incredibles') has too much sheen.
For this animation I played around with the reflection
node, but there are many more places one could attack
the sheen. It's not a matter of dialing back the lights..
if you do so, you cut down the sheen but the model's face
goes dark. And in my mind "Jessi is too blonde" already.
I do NOT like the look of the default texture with blonde
hair. The coloring is NOT right and the contrast too stark
and dissonant.

I deployed face_off's "Realism" shader suite both to
supply depth and texture to the skin, and also to lighten
the texture's tone. I could also have opened the texture
in my graphic software to adjust the color.

Stats:
Poser 6
Content SR1
Jessi (not hi-res jessi)
Morphs: none. This is only the default visage.
Conforming dress
JessiShortBlonde strand hair
Frame size: 405x405
Frame rate: 30fps
Engine: Firefly
3 Lights: main , filler, backlight' shadow cast
on main only, no raytrace, AO or IBL
Render: hair dynamics (four required) ran REALLY FAST,
like in 15 seconds each. I was amazed.
Render settings:
smooth polygons
use displacement maps
minshading rate .2
pixel samples 10
max texture size 512
bucket 32

Render rig: AMD Athlon 3500+, 4GigRam, RaptorArrayRaid-0
Render time for 150 frames: 12 hours, 40 minutes

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