Until my recent purchase of Poser 7, it was the P4 renderer all the way! Why? Because my P5 firefly was at best....pathetic! Now, with P7 and it's very reliable FF engine, I'm changing my tune. The problem is, while Kozaburo's hair renders better in this version of firefly, it's still a far cry from the old P4 renderer :(   And yes, I've been digging through old posts for nearly two hours now looking for hints and....well... any of you that have ever done a forum search know exactly what kind of hell I've just been through!

So here's the deal, for my first ever freestuff item, I'm seriously thinking of writing a 'be all end all' tutorial so that we can finally put this issue to rest! By this I mean to include solutions for any and all problems concerning transmapped hair and the firefly renderer(speciffically for P7).

Now, in order to do this, I need some help from everyone. Basically, if you have ANY advice to give concerning the above mentioned issue, then by all means... speak up! Including screenshots will definitely be a plus! And of course, you will be credited in the tut if I include your ideas. My point here is to put everything about firefly/transmapped hair into one place! 

Granted, I might seem fixated on Kozaburo here but, that's only because IMHO, his KyotoMK3 hair is still pretty much the best model out there! In fact, I'm currently trying to finish my first real freebie which involves his model and MANY magnets. I plan to call it "Connie's Hair Morph for KyotoMK3". However, this friggin' firefly problem has put a halt to the production process!

So please help me and any future noobs out! Thanks!

BTW - "Connie" is a reference to Constance Frances Maria Lake (aka - Veronica Lake). Above is a preview of where I'm at with her hair right now...yup, lotsa curling left to do!

To render transmapped hair correctly with the Firefly render engine the hair must NOT be visible to raytracing.  That's what caused your issue in the image your included.

I've had problems with Future Hair when using Firefly. Texture filtering helps a little. Works best with a P4 render, but I like firefly. Now what's going on here? (you'll need to scroll to see all the pics)

Hey Victoria_Lee, thanks for that tidbit! I tend to forget all about the options in the parameters pallet. Sadly, when I turned off 'visible in raytracing', there seemed to be no change But hey, if you have any other advice, PLEASE post it! Like I said before, it would be great to get all of this advice on transmapping in one place!

Now Ashley, you're having a similar problem to what I had with Koz's LongHairEvo about 2 years ago. The crappy part is that I can't find the old thread concerning this   As I can recall, the fix had something to do with displacement bounds and setup of poser's native units in general preferences(?)...
Hey SVDL! I think it was you who advised me on this, so if ya got a moment, please chime in!

Oh and bagginsbill! If you know some shader tricks for this, please post them (or a link). The same goes for anybody else with good advice! DrGeep? Pakled? Operaguy? Acadia? ....anybody?

I don't have the FutureHair, so anybody with advice on Ashley's problem will definitely be helpful!

• keep "Normals_forward" in the hair materials checked * texture filtering is your friend * control the detail with the "shading rate" parameter - lower is finer is slower

I don't know what to tell you. I just add that hair and render with my usual settings - it works great.

I've attached comparison renders as you did. My results are the opposite of yours - the P4 is doing strange stuff with the hair.

I never bother with the P4 renderer. On the left, you can see that it has done a terrible job with the hair shadows, and is getting pixelation/aliasing on the hair. While on the right, it looks great. (Note: My eye shaders use reflection and refraction and the P4 renderer can't deal with that so her irises are black.) Click to see detail in full size.

This is lit with a generic IBL I use all the time at 45%, and a single spotlight at 65%. The IBL has no AO or anything, while the spotlight has a shadow map size of 1200 and uses depth mapped shadows with a 2 pixel blur. The spotlight is even with her forehead and pretty much pointing straight at her eyes.

I'm using P6 - perhaps this is another case of P7 shadow bugs. I've seen lots, and I'm pretty happy that I didn't bother getting P7. The many shadow bugs notwithstanding, it offers absolutely nothing new in the material room, where I live.

My usual render settings, which I used here, are:

Cast shadows: ON
Texture filtering: Off
Raytracing: On
Raytrace bounces: 4
Min shading rate: 0.5
Pixel samples: 3
Max texture size: 1024
Max bucket size: 64
Min displacement bounds: 0

Shadow only: Off
Smooth polygons: Off
Remove backfacing polys: Off
Use displacement maps: On
Depth of field: Off
3D motion blur: Off
Toon outline: Off
Post filter size: 1
Post filter type: box

Oooh - I just tried enabling Normals_Forward for the hair material. This made one small difference. The hair under her left ear (our right side) is being viewed from the wrong side and as a result the shadows didn't fall on it. My first render is missing those shadows.

Here's a bigger render with the Normals_Forward option enabled on the hair material. No difference on the front facing polys, but the others are now receiving shadows. Also, I increased the Max texture size to 4096 because of the extreme detail needed at this magnification.

Click to see full size.

EUREKA!! ...sort of. Thank you VERY much stewer and bagginsbill!!! As seen above, following both of you on this proved successful immediately! I didn't have a lot of free time to explore much further today, so tomorrow I'll see about trying the unchanged version of Koz's hair. Mainly because my new version has a lot of distortion in the geometry (too heavy on the magnets) and I think my photoshopped-all-to-hell texture is also causing some issues :P

BTW- my lights are nearly always setup as 1 spot behind the figure and 1 infinite in front, both on depth mapped shadows. As for IBL and AO stuff, remember, I've only had P7 for about 2 weeks and know nothing about either. That'll change soon though!

Thanks again guys! More tomorrow.... 

Just for sh*ts n' giggles I changed the infinite light to a basic IBL. Kinda cool if I ever need to render instant pop-art 

Don't know about P7, but I do know in P6....the Trans fall-off value in the materials room comes in at a default setting of 0.6. This causes render issues with all transmapped items as far as I've seen (the not quite transparent halo around items). I always double check to make sure it's set at 0 and haven't had any major issues.

Course, it has been months since I actually rendered something in Poser other than display mockups for work...so I don't have much else to share.

Quote - Don't know about P7, but I do know in P6....the Trans fall-off value in the materials

Maybe this is my problem with Future hair.
I'll play around with various Trans values when I get home.
I should have really thought of this eh.
Thanks guys.

Hey Ashley, also try plugging the texture node into displacement with a setting of 0.0001 (this fix comes from Koz). This didn't seem to make a difference with the Kyoto hair but, maybe it will work for the Agent hair.  Now, as you can see above, I used bagginsbill's settings to the letter and " WHOOP! There it is!   WHOOP! There it is!   C'mon V3, kick those daisies... lookit V3 with dem daisey dukes.. OHHH!".............   er, sorry 'bout that! Got a little excited there...er...um... well

So my next thing is to tinker with the shadow maps sizes and actually try some IBL. Another thing though, and this might surprise you but, how do I adjust the max texture size? Seriously, I can seem to find this anywere in general prefs, material room or render settings? Sadly, after RTFM I still can't find this setting! .....weird!

Some node alterations can make all the difference, here is an old pic that adds noise that can be handy in controling painted hair highlights. This pic is old and I know noise is widely used, but I'll add it anyway.

Here is a thread on lighting that might help some, though not complete.
http://www.contentparadise.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3607

Hope this helps.

Hey Anton, thanks for posting those! I'll definitely try some experimenting later on today :)

Thanks for the 'fall-off' tip, Realmling. I've noticed that different hair models tend to get the halo effect without this setting, so I generally plug the transparency node into all three trans inputs on the poser surface pallet... just in case.

Quote - Just for sh*ts n' giggles I changed the infinite light to a basic IBL. Kinda cool if I ever need to render instant pop-art

 

I think that IBLs are about three times as much light as a similar infinite light.

i believe that bagginsbill has said that an ibl with no image at 45% is a useful component to good indoor lighting.

One IBL light set to black color, but with IBL contrast set to zero will globally light your scene like a toon render. It is interesting. The value of contrst adds darkness.

Anton that's wacky! I never thought to try black, that is counterintuitive. If I had to guess, I'd predict that a BLACK IBL would have zero effect - it would act like it is turned off. But setting the contrast to zero - hmm. The contrast is actually passed to something like the Poser math function "Gain". A gain of 0 pretty much forces everything to gray, no matter what brightness it starts with. If you set the color to 50% gray, and gain to 1, is there a difference? If so, I'm going to need to study this some more - you may have teased out a very interesting bit of internal behavior that I was not aware of.

I'd try it myself, but I'm really busy with "real work" today.

Thanks for the tip!

"One IBL light set to black color, but with IBL contrast set to zero will globally light your scene like a toon render. It is interesting. The value of contrst adds darkness."

As far as I can remember, all I did was change my infinite light to an IBL. No other adjustments were made (except for V3's pose) and the light color was 100% white on full intensity.

As for IBL's, I've got some homework to do on those... hopefully this weekend.

I think the next phase is for me to experiment with different lights in order to see how they affect the hair individually. So far I'm seeing better results with depthmap shadows versus raytraced.

sigh.....so much to learn, so little free time....:P

IBL light color and intensity seem to be IN ADDITION to the default brightness. Meaning one IBL Light set to black is a fully lit scene. This can only be seen when contrast on the node is set to zero.

This was just my observation. The light below is black. IBL with IBL Contrast at zero at frame 1

IBL Contrast:-------------------
Effect: Adds darkness determining contrast ratio between lit and shadowed mesh.
Description: Greater value blackens the image. Zero is fully lit. Black overlay that darkens the entire rendered lit mesh except the shadows. Noise works well in this node socket.

This gif illustrated how the IBL contrast value box adds darkness to the image.

Oh man, THIS is great! When I started this thread I didn't plan on getting some very useful IBL help. Not to mention the highlight tricks! Thanks a bunch, Anton! 

@bagginsbill: While doing the search I mentioned earlier, I stumblied across a thread where you were experimenting with a greyscale texture map for Koz hair that made color changes easier through nodes. Did you ever get this to work right?

Attached Link: Attempt at reducing Koz hair speculars in P6

Are you talking about that thread?

I thought it did work right. Didn't it? What else do you want it to do?

That's the thread where Anton give his noise-based adjuster too.

Ideally hair has three tonal values being Highlight, Lowlight, and Midtone. As sometimes done with skinmap, you could have 3 maps each defining the hue, color, and saturation for each.

http://www.for-the-birds.net/Hair.jpg

You can see how noise can simulate cuticle on the hairshaft. It is especially important in the speculat highlight(not the color highlight).

As I mentioned in the IBL thread, notice how color becomes more saturated when lit and desaturated in shadow. A common 3d mistake is to make lit surfaces lighter and paler.

Here is another pic. The specular highlight that zigzags across the hair is the shimmer and has a more pastel color value if any.

Bagginsbill,

is there a way, with nodes to get a color to saturate when lit and desaturate when not?

Sure.The easiest way to identify parts that are strongly lit is to use the Specular node or Phong node. The difference is that the Specular node will pick out the points on the surface that are at the right angle to "mirror" the light source directly into the camera. The Phong node picks out the points on the surface that are pointing straight at the light. You choose,

Anyway, in mathetmatical terms (i.e. using Matmatic notation):

satBroadness = .7
satStrength = 1
Blend(color, saturatedversionofcolor, Specular(1, satStrength, satBroadness))

In English, add a Blend node. Connect your ordinary color to Value_1. Connect your saturated color to Value_2. In the Blend value, plug a Specular node. Adjust the Specular_Value to adjust teh saturation strength. Adjust the Highlight_Size (or Roughness - can't remember which) to control the broadness of the effect - larger values will spread it farther.

Now as for computing the saturated color - you could use HSV. Plug the original texture map into an HSV node, and adjust the saturation to be more than 1. You may also play with adjusting the Value. So the whole thing might look like this:

color = Image_Map(":runtime:textures:...blah balh your texture here.jpg")
clr = Blend(color, HSV(color, 1, 1.3), Specular(1, 1, .7))

This is actually another way to do my UBSS. The UBSS way uses fewer nodes, but that is in the context of an entire shader and I was able to combine a few things.

In general, this is the simplest way to get a more saturated color calculation in places that are strongly lit that you can use any way you want.
 
Then you can use the output of this - clr - to plug into whatever you like, for example the Diffuse_Color.

I'm not at a Poser PC at the moment so can't show you a shader screenshot.

Okay so what you are saying is 

Specular npde for specular, glossy highlighs.
Phone node to color saturation of anything facing a light.

In the diffuse color, plug phone into saturation.

I am not familiar with matmatic so not sure there, but I'll give it a try.

Basically yes.

Can I make a suggestion? Do some fast experimenting to get familiar with whats going on.

Use a sphere and one infinite light. Lower render settings so you can do lots of renders in a few minutes. Try Min Shading Rate 3, Pixel Samples 1, no shadows, no ray tracing.

Turn off the Diffuse_Color and Specular_Color on the sphere. Plug Phong into the Alt_Diffuse or Alt_Specular - makes no difference. Now render. Move the light and render again. Adjust the parameters and render again. You should be getting an idea of what the Phong lights up.

Now unplug the Phong. Add a Blender node with RED and BLUE in in it. Plug the Phong into the Blender Blend value. Plug the blender into alt_diffuse. Render. Move the light - render. Where before the phong was lighting the sphere, now it is deciding to color it blue instead of red. This should help you anticipate what this setup is doing.

Now unplug the Blender from the root and plug it into the Diffuse_Color instead. Raise the Diffuse_Value back to 1. Now you are getting lighting involved, but the color is being chosen by the Phong->Blender pair.

Turn the Specular_Value back on to about .5. Set the Specular_Color to white and Highlight_Size = .1. Render again. Play with the balance between the Blender colors and the Specular.

You can even use another Phong-.Blender pair to drive the Specular_Color. 

"Attached Link: Attempt at reducing Koz hair speculars in P6

Are you talking about that thread?

I thought it did work right. Didn't it? What else do you want it to do?

That's the thread where Anton give his noise-based adjuster too."

---

Thanks for reposting that. Sorry about the confusion! I remembered PapaBlueMarlin having trouble with his technique and somehow I mixed that up with yours. Oops!

Tomorrow is my day off, so I "should" have time to finally delve into all of this new material. Well, new for me anyway!

Busy day for me! I've been tinkering around with node-based highlights all day and came up with a neat mix of both Anton's and Bagginbill's suggestions. I also used my own 'photoshopped-to-hell' texture/trans map like in the first post. Above are my settings for light and materials.

No offense, bagginsbill, but I tried your greyscale method on this hair and I just couldn't come up with a look that I liked. I still plan to try it later on with the Longhair Evo style as I'm determined to make that method useful for me!

Up next is the render.....

As is obvious, there's still work to be done on the highlights. I'm positive the washed out highlights are a result of the modified texture, which I plan to fix in Photoshop tomorrow (runs off to find 15lb sledgehammer, just in case).

The red arrows show the troubled highlights, the blue arrows indicate more work to be done with shadows and the yellow arrows.....

....well.... they just indicate the underside of the arm.... for those who have a V3 armpit fetish

More to come...

BTW - For years I've been referring to this model as "Kyoto" when in fact it's "KYOKO"! Yup! I'm a moron! But at least I admit it!

Here's a radical idea for you. Keep the transmap image, but get rid of the color texture image and replace it with a 100% procedural approach.

I wouldn't have tried this without matmatic as it requires a lot of math nodes.

This is a quick test as proof of concept. I did not put in all the math to produce all the features required in the color map. In particular there is a section on the lower right that has to swap the U/V coordinates to make the hair strands go horizontal instead of vertical. And within THAT, there is a tiny strip where they go vertical anyway. Also the darkening at the roots was only partially implemented for the upper row of color strips. The lower row still needs that treatment, and the upper row of strips should not all be darkened at the top. But all of that is fixable.

I used a carefully tuned Fractal_Sum node to generate the hair strands. The basic premise seems sound to me. In addition to dealing with all those coordinate issues, I'd probably add another layer or two of hair strands that are slightly out of alignment with the bottom layer.

Once I get all the math worked out, you simply would have to edit two color parameters to get any look you wanted. I could also add some distortion to the strand generator to get wavy hair.

What do we think?

whoa.  i'm very, very impressed.  that sounds very painstaking.  and looks great.

to be honestly critical: it's a little too perfectly parallel, unclumped (hair makes sub-groups), thick stranded and low contrast (even in that light- right now i'm looking at people in a very uniformly lit room, and their hair is still much higher contrast, especially if it's long and shiny) for a final result, but it seems like a good place to start if you're going to postwork it or go for a very graphic look (or both).  the very soft and even highlights remind me of greypixel's work.

but that's just me.

Man, where do you come up with this stuff? I'd definitely like to try that with different hair models as well. Let's face it, what you have there(with a little tweaking) could look better than some of the current transmapped hairs for sale! 

My only gripe with this is getting the right color. To me, that shade of blonde that you have looks a little greenish. Picky, I know! But that was my main problem with the greyscale method, getting the color just right. Then again, it could be just my monitor.

Question. How would you fix the area under the curl at the forehead? I think the vertical roots in that section were on the texture map, not the transmap.

I am dying to play with this some more. Just need the time.

Bagginsbill,

If there a 101 begginners guide somewhere on where to get and how to install matmatic?

It is greenish. I fiddled with the colors and got tired of it - fascinating how subtle hair color is. No wonder hair coloring products (good ones) are so expensive.

The curl at the forehead is that part I was talking about where on the color map I have to switch direction of the strands, and I didn't do that. Open one of the Koz texture files and look at the lower right corner. You'll see what I mean. In fact the strands of to curl just right on that part. I know how to do it (mathetmatically) its just going to take a bit of tweaking and experimenting.

CD: I agree its too regular and too dull. Again, I was just taking a few minutes to work out the idea, between other things. The contrast issue I didn't even start to address - I just slapped two colors on a blender, ran the fractal_sum into it, and plugged that into the Diffuse_Color. I can do much better.

After I posted, I did a two-layer version with some strands crossing others, and it looked better. The clumping and twisting of independent layers can be done. Just takes some practice. I haven't tried something like this before.

I think in the end choosing what colors to plug in will be the hardest part.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2979858

Anton, Follow the link. Once you unzip matmatic into your Poser directory, open the file Poser XRuntimePythonmatmaticdocsindex.html

If you're using P7 you need to download another file as well. Read about it at the linked thread.

Did you see I'm working on shaders for AM?

most all haircolor has warmth in it, being orange and red. True yellow can look greenish evenif it isn't.

Hair that is unexposed to sunlight and it's lightening effects is ashen. Fawny or dull oakish tones.

Sunlight bleaches the hair, but because there is no pigments going in, it lightens warmly to golden or redish tones.

Blondes that are a result of sunlight are yellow and amber in highlight.
Nordic or scandanacian blondes are wheetish and cool.

In hairdressing, blondes can look brassy because of the large amount of hair being suddenly lightened all at once. In nature typically the mix of ash and warmth controls the look of the color.

For 3d hair colors, think wheat and sand for blondes, chocolate and oak for browns, chestnuts and barbacue sauce for reds.

In haircoloring in the realy world, haircolor ranges from level 1 to 12. 

1=blackest of any black.
5=lightest of brows and most  dark redheads.
6= Darkest blonde begins at this number
8=Natural light blonde
9 Scadanavian
10 Scadanavian
11 Platinum
12 Platinum
anything higher than a 12 is purest white and devoid of any pigment.

Crosspost. Those look great. I will dig into it this weekend. I have to sort out a display issue I am having with Poser6.

The shaders look great. Don't forget his lashes are dialed off by default. Looks nice and luminous without being greasy. I like it. I would try cutting down the displacement by about 25%.  I like the amount of strength you got without distortion. Very cool.

Peak at my face nodes. (See image) I managed fine capilaries under his skin that I liked a lot. though I only liked them on the face. Anywhere else they made him look blotchy. I did this to get that natural red tone. It also brought a lot of nice effect to the face renders.

I am noticing you added a variant tone of your own? Looks like you varies the surface tones also somewhow or is it just my imagination? Either way, I like it.

Btw. I love the eyes. I could never get mine the way I wanted them.

The tones are variable - that's the point of the shader. You adjust the "stain" color, like using stain on wood. That's how I made the hulk image - changed the stain to green. I don't know why people collect so many different textures. For any given figure, I find there is one that got the details right, and I can adjust the skin tone quite easily in the mat room. Don't need 50 different color textures with the same features on them.

Same with eyes - find one you like? Good now run it through an HSV node - infinite iris colors.

Capillaries - I'll add them. I've done those before. I have about 25 different effects in my bag of tricks. But I was trying to keep it simple as the point of the Ultra Basic Skin Shader was that it is basic. This project was an extension of UBSS to help some readers adapt it to AM. But I can do whatever I want - I'll give them more versions. Simple to complex.

Those are your eyes textures - I just applied my standard reflection and refraction stuff to them plus a little subsurface scattering to color them. Will post all this soon. You need to use the Fresnel effect to get them to look right. 

The skin is all your texture files too. Thanks for the tip about the displacement - was just starting to mess with it. Value = 1, nope. Value = .8, nope. Value = .7, nope. :biggrin:

I wanted to ask you about the AM cornea - is it convex? I couldn't really tell. How about the iris - is it concave? I ask because when I look real close the geometry (as seen through the refractive cornea) doesn't look right the way it does on V3.

I agreee. One texture is generally all you need. Now with nodes, any hair texture will do. Unfortunately Poser's clumbsy and undocumented node system doesn't help much.
 
Maps have their role though but things like teeth and such should really need them.

I like the way you got the eye reflections.

The cornea is Convex. The Iris is like a Lifesaver candy. It is concave but with edges.

My displacement maps are brighter than others', but likewise meant to be used at lower values.