Hey all,

I am not very familiar with the hair options in Poser, so i was hoping that you people could help.

I do not want to create hair from scratch, but i would like to animate hair models that i have already purchased. For instance 3d Sensual Hair for v4. How would i animate individual strands of hair? is this possible or can you only achieve this by creating your own hair in Poser?

matt

Adorana has lots of free Dynamic Hair.  There is also a tutorial that comes with their hair models that tells you how to use Dynamic Hair. It's done in the Pose room, not the hair room. Very easy actually. Easy to set up but time consuming to have it run.

http://www.adorana.de/downloads/

Download a hair package and look at the readme file.

Thinking aloud:

Perhaps one may add the windforce effect to the hair mesh and use that in animation ?  

(The time taken to learn that will be almost as much as setting up the Dynamic Hair, possibly )

Alternatively, I suppose I could pose the hair one way in frame1, then pose it another way in frame30, and yet another in frame60, then return it to the same pose as in frame 1 for frame90.  Set it to looping and it appaers that the hair is being blown repeated by a wind.  Not exactly real, but rather anime in look and feel.  Hmmm.

If it's hair you bought, it is almost certainly polygonal hair, which means you won't ever get the "animating individual strands" that you hope for.  This type of hair is solid sheets of polygons, like strips of transparent flat plastic, with the texture painted onto it.  There is some polygon hair that can simulate what you're looking for, but be aware it tends to have a lot of polygons and can greatly increase your render times, because the geometry is so complex.  

One example you might like to play with is Jolie Filie hair by Aery_Soul.  It is still polygonal hair, but with a nice, complex geometry with many separate "strands".  It has a huge number of very diverse morphs and is very flexible and powerful.  It's also fairly expensive (representative of the high quality and craftsmanship).

Oops, forgot to add:  The only way to really get what you sound like you want is to learn to use the Hair Room (dynamic hair).

Be aware, if you use the Hair Room, that dynamic hair greatly increase the render times. So if it's for an animation... Just be prepared.

Thank you everyone for replying so fast with a lot of useful information.
 
I guess my best bet will be to either create hair from scratch in the dynamic hair room or purchuse some products that you have recommended here, already set up as dynamic hair. 

By the way all of the hair you linked me to seems to be v3 hair models do you know of any v4 dynamic hair models?

What would happen if i applied a windforce effect to the polygon hair?

cheers

Matt

I don't think anybody sells any dynamic hair setups, I can't recall seeing any.  

If a given polygonal hair item says that it's for V3, typically you can resize it a bit and wiggle it around to make it fit V4's head without too much trouble, when treating it as a parented prop - but getting it to conform to V4 will probably be quite a bit more difficult, or even impractical for the purpose of animation.  The particular hair I mentioned, Jolie Filie hair, is a prop, so it's not very difficult to get thei hair to fit.  It comes with a skullcap also, to make the scalp appear to have dense hair, and the skullcap is a conforming figure, but it can also just be treated as a prop (simply do not conform it, only parent it to the head).

Applying wind force to polygonal hair, in and of itself, won't do anything, although you might experiment with trying to treat the hair as dynamic cloth in the Cloth Room, but that generally won't work well at all.  The Hair Room won't work with polygonal hair at all, as far as I know.  The only ways you can get anything at all to react to wind force generators in Poser is via either the Cloth Room or the Hair Room.

I think there are Poser 5 and 6 Dynamic Hair products ? 

The problem is, as I have found out, you need a scalp base to grow the hair from. 

That either means you get the permission  of the figure's creator to extract the scalp mesh, or you get a royalty-free scalp base which you can re-distribute with your dynamic hair files.  Some creators may take the view that "body-bagging" a scalp mesh may be an infringement of their work, so one must always check with source.

Poser 7 provides royalty-free scalps, and I think Netherworks and PhilC have scalp meshes, and there are a few others, but I can't recall off the top of my head right now.

Ok thanks for all of the advice and help. The hair room really does sound like the only possibility to achieve what i really want. and i think i will purchase Jolie Fille hair, mainly as the skull cap is exactly what i want to grow the hair from. 

Although it would not look as good one way i could animate the hair using the Jollie Fille hair would be to set a key frame at the start of an animation with the hair in a certain pose and then at the end of the animation i could add one of the Jollie Fille's hair morphs, so that will animate the hair from point A to B and could look ok if done right.

In terms of the sculp mesh i cannot see anyone having a problem with what i am doing, as i am not trying to make any money from this. It is for my own personal use, but if things were to go further then i would definetly ask permission. 

matt

If you only need a skull cap, you will preferably try to find a free skull cap designed for V3, and resize it to fit V4. As you'll grow hair from it, if it doesn't fit exactly, it won't be noticeable.
You could also try with the skull cap for Jessie that is already included with Poser.