I'm wading into dynamic hair from the really shallow end of the pool - I bought a dynamic hair product.

I'm really dumb with this, and the readme really doesn't tell me much... am I to understand that I still need to load the purchased product inside the hair room if I want the hair to move with my figure?

P8 does seem to render dynamic hair more quickly than transmapped hair, though I'll have to do a raytraced render to be sure. Here's my first test render. The hair is too bright; the vendor sez the lights have to be lower for dynamic hair, but I think that simply means the product's material settings need work. Here, I've already made alterations (diffuse and specular were both set at 1.0; I lowered to .65 and .35, respectively), but they're obviously not sufficient yet; any other suggestions on that score would be appreciated.

Ah, never mind my question about needing to load the hair in the hair room - I now see there's a "recalculate dynamics" button available on my palette. (However, in preview it seems to affect my V4 morph as well as the hair, which has me concerned....)

Hm. Sure seems to be faster than transmapped hair. This is raytraced; rendered in 6 minutes 18 seconds at 739x716 px with shading rate of 0.5, pixel samples @ 3.

Higher quality render did ameliorate the brightness issues a bit, but still not good.

Dynamics recalculation... well, not so good. Obviously there's hair driving through her forehead and out. Is it normal to expect to recalculate several times to get collisions solved?

In the panel properties you need to check "collision detection" for each part who are in collision with the hair -> head, neck, collar in this case .

And if you are not using IDL, then the hair material should be gamma corrected.

hborre i dont think hair node can be GC, may be i'm wrong ...

Anthanasius: thanks, I discovered the collision detection issue after I posted.

hborre: I presume you mean the incoming materials would need to be anti-gamma-corrected. Truth is, with IDL the problem is even worse... I'll have to look at the P8 dynamic hair, and see how they compare. Maybe I can learn from their material settings.

There is the IDL for dummies thread going currently evaluating the merits of IDL with GC.  Carodan will be conducting some tests in the near future.  BB has strongly recommended that IDL and Gc do not play well with each other.  At best, Gc will respond better with tonemapping settings.  Currently, the recommendation for D3D's Render Firefly dialog, set tonemapping gain to 1.3 and HSV exponential to 1.4.  If there are Gc shaders present, set the gamm to 1.3.  This includes VSS; the additional change there would be setting PM:SSS to 3

Ok BB has strongly recomended, but is there no law for this ;-)

Since P8 i use a very little vss, for me it was created for ibl ightning, and work very fine with it ... With idl is there too many thing to change ... first setting gc to 1, here i'm ok, but now its literaly all the render settings who need to be change, why dont change vss structure ?

But ot is another discution ...

Anthanasius, it would be nice to have just one all setting to cover most of your render needs.  However, you are aware that different scenes require different render approaches.  And finding the right settings can be very time consuming.  I never said that BB's recommendations were Gospel, but they are good starting point guidelines to find what is best for your needs.  LOL, believe me, I have to think very hard and long about the work involved changing nodes and modifying Gc when committing time to a personal project.  I was spoiled by PoserPro and I can't wait until the 2010 version is released officially.

With all the dynamic hair I have, you really don't need to go into the hair room UNLESS you want to modify the hair groups.

I simply load it using the Poser room, click on the skull cap and move it to the head, adjust the size and  I'm  good to go.  If  I find that the hair doesn't move with the head, parent it to the head.  You can also move the individual hair groups by clicking on the respective group.  Now if you want to fancy it up, then go to the hair room and have fun.  Jan

If you go to the hierachy menu, the dynamic hair should be found as a child of the head, along with the other children, the eyes-should go there automatically when you load it.  Jan  

hborre, the issues here have nothing to do with GC. I don't use material-based GC, and AFAIK that's the only way to do GC in P8. I'm using HSV somewhat moderately. But the bottom line is this: if everything else is rendering properly with normal lighting, then the material settings for the hair are just not right.

I am inclined to agree with you about that very issue.  The settings just are not correct to begin with.  It's probably the very nature with the blonde texture in general.  I had played with a hair shader recently which exhibited a very overblown specular response that I didn't expect.  Never bothered to follow it up in detail.  Maybe it's time to do a little testing.

I may have found the problem. Highlight size was set at 100.0 (!). Will alter that to 0.1 and see what happens....

EDIT: Looks like a false lead. So far, only the skull cap had that setting.

Okay, for anyone else who purchased Dixie Dynamic Hair and found the materials too bright, I've managed to resolve the issue. I changed the diffuse colour from white to black and checked Opaque in Shadow on all the parts. (I had also changed the diffuse value to .65 and specular value to .35 earlier, which made a small improvement.)

Here's my IDL render with the new settings:

Still need to figure how to deal with new problems related to shadow artifacting (presumably occasioned by the use of Opaque in Shadow?), but it's a lot more usable.

Much better that way.

It looks much better.  I'm just concerned about the shadowing cast between the strands.  What is your shadow min bias on your lights?  It might need adjustment.

The lights are three spotlights. In this instance, two lights have shadow min bias of .05; the other had 0.212. That may be a key part in the artifacting; usually I keep the SMB between 0.15 - 0.2; much lower, and Poser gives strange reactions (although not as bad as it used to be when I used AO rather than IDL).

Blur radius ranges from 4.0 to 4.6, which is perhaps a little high. Shadow samples range between 48 and 62. I can't say I'm really precise with these particular settings yet.

Hm, changing the other two shadow min bias to .212 as well didn't improve things; the render looks to me to be identical. 

I've played with the SMB recently on Infinite lighting and my conclusions seem to agree with your findings.  But I have noticed that lowering it too much extends the shadows significantly.  My range extended between 1.2 to 0.1.  IIRC, 0.8 SMB on infinite gave me good results with hair.  I also used a fill spotlight without any shadow; that might help with the process.  My lighting workflow with portrait images is to relatively keep it simple: one infinite for shadows, one fill spotlight and one rim light both without any shadows. 

I'm still guessing the problem is the Opaque in Shadow setting. In most places, where hair is next to hair, it looks right. But where it is sitting loose in front of the skin, it doesn't. Unfortunately, there are no adjustment options at all - it's just on or off.

Interesting. I basically don't use infinite lights anymore, as I don't think they're realistic. Meh.

I'll try this one more time with higher shadow min bias settings, closer to yours and see what happens.

Well, this is with 0.55 Shadow Min Bias. Not all that much of an improvement.

I think I'm gonna try paring down to one spotlight and see what happens.

Well, having only one spotlight instead of three doesn't solve the issue, but at least it's not magnified to the power of three... sure wish I could figure out how to render artifact-free consistently, although I haven't had too many problems lately until attempting dynamic hair.

Well, here's with an infinite casting shadows, plus one spot in approximately the same position with shadows off. Artifacting is quite a bit better (but not gone - note in particular the spot beside her left brow), though of course the lighting doesn't look as natural.

Perhaps the best I'm gonna do....

Attached Link: Dynamic Hair styling tutorial

One last one for now. Essentially the same set up as previous image, but with higher quality render settings. Looking pretty good, I think....

Believable3D,
That last render is very nice.
You really achieve the "natural" look.
It is "Beleivable".
Thanks so much for this wonderful info.
cheerio
lululee

Yep, that's a keeper.  Very nice.

Thanks. Unfortunately, PJZ pointed out that I now have nostril glow. Never realized that switching from spotlight to infinite would do that....

Heh. I'm addicted now. I love dynamic hair. Here's a very quick render of KaiZ's Crinkly Hair with a couple material adjustments, just using default P8 render settings (no IDL) and a couple of spotlights.

That looks wild!  Very nice render.

Thanks. The thing is that that sort of style is pretty much impossible with transmapped hair, I think.

Okay, here's an example of how quickly dynamic hair renders in P8. This image is 717x643 px (click to view full size). Render settings are reasonably high: lots of shadow samples on the lights, 2 IDL bounces, 3 pixel samples, 0.7 shading rate, 376 IDL samples, displacement on, number of threads set at 6.

My computer is virtually bogged down, because my hard drive is full, and I had several programs open.

The image rendered in 30 minutes and a few seconds.

If that were transmapped hair, no way I could get an image of that size to render in that time at those settings. (Incidentally, the scene is Poser World's Talk Show.)

The last time I ran a portrait render with transmap hair and IDL, hmmm.....5 hours.

Yes, and with transmapped hair, pushing the quality up seems to affect the render time exponentially. Not so with dynamic hair, apparently. Here's my latest (click for full size; see below image to see my render settings & render time):

RENDER SETTINGS

Pixel Samples: 3
Shading Rate: 0.2
IDL Bounces: 5
Samples: 480
Irradiance Cache: 79.6

Smoothing, shadows, displacement all enabled.

RENDER TIME: 36 minutes - just marginally longer than the settings I used earlier.

I've been following this thread, while searching for a link to some dynamic hair shaders that I got from RDNA before the change over.  Several days later I've finally found the link to the thread for Olivier's hair shader! :)
http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35621
He attaches his material to post #4.

P.S. ...that hair looks super!! :D
Jan