Believable3D opened this issue on Dec 21, 2009 · 80 posts
Believable3D posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 12:18 AM
Okay, I've got into this and would love to see what you're doing.
The accompanying image is brutally bad, and I'm aware of it. But it's my first-ever attempt at creating hair myself in the Poser Hair Room, and my first-ever test render of said attempt. (I'm using the skull cap from PhilC's Hair Designer as the prop base; it's set to invisible.)
Now that you've seen the worst, show me something nice. :)
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Believable3D posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 1:38 AM
Heehee. This hairstyle is a mess! But I'm having fun. This was rendered with mid-level quality settings (no IDL, 0.2 min shading rate, 77 irradiance cache) in 11 minutes 15 seconds. (Click for full size.)
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coltrace posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 8:38 PM
Wonderful work and fantastic to actually see someone experimenting with what is one of the least used and understood "rooms" in Poser.
You are doing things just fine and you will get even better.
It's a pity that the Hair Room isn't more interactive with the user but that must wait for even faster CPU's !!
I've attached some of the stuff I've done lately as you did ask :)
Thanks for sharing yours, Believable :)
Believable3D posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 8:41 PM
Hey, thanks for the post. Looks like you've been having some fun there! :)
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hborre posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 10:27 PM
pjz99 posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 11:38 PM
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1536314&user_id=472534&np&np ignore the terrible rig, enjoy the fabulous hair
a bit of nudity there
hborre posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 11:55 PM
Beautiful piece of work and great render!
Believable3D posted Mon, 21 December 2009 at 11:58 PM
LOL, pjz! Love that hair. But it may be a bit hard on her neck if the wind ever stops. :)
hborre: that really looks quite good.
Here's my first IDL render with the Poser Pro 2010 beta. Just a default style of KaiZ's Crinkly Hair, with a bit of material mods. (Click for full size.) EDIT: Meh. That's SHORTY Hair, not Crinkly Hair.
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Believable3D posted Tue, 22 December 2009 at 9:35 AM
Okay, here's a W.I.P. of a hairstyle I'm working on now that I've figured out a better workflow. This time I created all my hair groups before growing any hair. :) I also have a bit better handle on what display modes to use, but I wish there were some better options for seeing existing groups while editing (maybe they're there but I haven't found them....)
Click for full size.
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pjz99 posted Tue, 22 December 2009 at 10:59 AM
One thing that Poser's dynamic hair does not handle very well (or at all) is the hair line. Any place on the model where you will have the hair line visible, you probably need to define multiple groups. In other apps like Cinema you could define a distribution map and paint a more natural looking hair line, in Poser you have to put in quite a bit more work placing some variation all along the hair line.
dadt posted Tue, 22 December 2009 at 1:37 PM
Believable3D posted Thu, 24 December 2009 at 4:12 AM
FWIW, I think I'm pretty close to having this hairstyle where I want it "structurally." Probably time to work on the material settings. (Click for full size.)
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Believable3D posted Fri, 25 December 2009 at 11:27 PM
I have to play even on Christmas!
Just posted this in my gallery. Believe it or not, it's actually the same hairstyle you see above - just didn't run the dynamic sim. Thought it looked intriguing the way it was. No postwork except for enlargement. Original was 808x689 px. I didn't time it, but it couldn't have taken more than 5 minutes. (P8; irradiance caching = 98; 2 raytrace bounces; min shading rate 0.21; HSV Exponential @ 1.30; lighting provided by two raytrace spotlights. No IDL.)
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Believable3D posted Sat, 26 December 2009 at 12:54 PM
Couldn't resist an IDL render. This rendered in just under 25 minutes @ 808x689. Scene is Silent Illumination from DAZ; morph is a slightly modified Hayden (which I believe is a celebrity freebie from Rogerbee).
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coltrace posted Sat, 26 December 2009 at 6:11 PM
Degenerated ? Not at all. All your creative and exciting work is wonderful to behold !
It' great to see how things are panning out for you and your obvious joy in these outcomes.
There is so much that the old Hair Room is capable of ith some effort and good on you for getting into it.
Soon you'll be the Jedi of the Hair room :)
I saw mentioned that the hair line was a bit too bold for some folk.
Using the "soft root" option often will give the hair line a more organic look as will a more tesselated mesh in the appropriate area.
By the way, I don't yet have Poser8. Can you tell me, Believable, if you've noticed any speed ups with Poser8 in the hair Room ?
I've just attached a render that I did and like you I stopped it part way through the sim. !!
Please keep up your very informative and valuable posts and renders !!
Believable3D posted Sat, 26 December 2009 at 6:21 PM
Thanks for the encouragement and thoughts, coltrace.
I can't give firsthand info regarding relative speed difference between P8 and earlier versions, as I never used the Hair Room before. The simulations are a funny thing... with the style I'm working on, the little parts on the sides at the bottom are VERRRRRRRRRRRRRRY slow and sometimes even crash the program. But the rest simulate quite quickly.
However, Bagginsbill has said that there were marked performance improvements for dynamic hair in P8. I don't know if that means just for rendering or for dynamics calculation as well. All I do know is that there is no comparison between rendering dynamic hair and transmapped hair in P8. Dynamic is much faster, and usually I like the look of it better too, even though I have a lot of really great transmapped hair products in my runtime. (I kinda got addicted to buying hair and casual/everyday type clothes, which is why my hard drive is bursting.)
That's an... interesting render. :)
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bopperthijs posted Tue, 29 December 2009 at 6:32 PM
Some tips on styling:
- use different display settings : outline for selecting the hair, and cartoon wtih lines for styling, the rendered and shaded displays make the hairs less visible.
just my two cents.
I'm still not very happy with the hair shader, which seems to change with every lighting setup. But I've noticed there's also a thread about hairshaders, so perhaps I can learn there something usefull.
best regards,
Bopper.
-How can you improve things when you don't make mistakes?
Believable3D posted Tue, 29 December 2009 at 6:50 PM
Thanks for the thoughts, bopper. That's looking pretty good. :)
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coltrace posted Tue, 29 December 2009 at 6:56 PM
Valuable and wise comments there, Bopper and many thanks for them.
I was lucky enough to be invited to ine of the Goldcoasts leading graphics labs. here in Australia.
They use Poser7 with a quad setup and a Nvidea Quadro FX3000.
The guy in charge said it took just about two days to configure the Quadro to accept Poser but wowie what results they get !
No more messing about with "show populated". Just leave everything on full and the preview window just hums along. No stutters or stammers. No halting or stopping when panning or rotating.
So smooth and the preview render looks so bloody close to a final render it would drop the jaw of anyone.
However the price of such fluidity is about the price of 4 excellent computers with monitors !!
Too expensive for me. I'll stick with my old openGL card for now but I'm saving up !!
Thanks again for those words of wisdom, Bopper and more piccies please !! :)
coltrace posted Tue, 29 December 2009 at 7:03 PM
Just a quick edit..
It was a FX4800 !!
I've got the cheaper one (FX3000)
Donations accepted by the way :)
hobepaintball posted Wed, 30 December 2009 at 6:40 AM
Attached Link: Dynamic hair and cloth plus BVH motion capture
Here is a short video using Lululee's Dynamic hair. It worked very nicely for me, but I haven't figured out how to change colors yet.
hobepaintball posted Wed, 30 December 2009 at 6:41 AM
Quote - Dynamic hair is also useful for other purposes, as in the fringe on this costume.
Could you give a broad overview of how you did this? it seems perfect for a sniper suit i'm wanting to do.
Believable3D posted Wed, 30 December 2009 at 1:55 PM
Quote - Here is a short video using Lululee's Dynamic hair. It worked very nicely for me, but I haven't figured out how to change colors yet.
You're talking about changing colours with her own set, or altering them to do something custom? You'll need to apply them in the material room. Dynamic hair is prop based and unfortunately you can't just apply a pose to change colours. So go to the Material Room, and for Dixie's own colours, go to the Materials library, and you'll find !lululeeHairColors. Select from there.
As for custom colours and adapting Lululee's work, you may be interested in this thread:
Purchased dynamic hair
Vince Bagna also shows some simple hair shader setups in this thread:
... and dadt shows how to do multiple colours in this thread
Some dynamic hair questions
HTH.
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coltrace posted Fri, 01 January 2010 at 12:15 AM
These pics show the Poser7 hires prim.plane selected as the hair group and the "hair" colour changed to suit.
Its a great way of making 3D grass and very very quick to render.
The "puppet" I made was for a kiddies show and again the Poser7 hair room came to the rescue with almost believable "straw".
The curly fella was jus for fun and consisted of over 100000 hairs!
Even the opengl card had fun when rotating this in the preview window !!
A normal games card just froze straight away.
Thanks Believable for this thread!! :)
dadt posted Fri, 01 January 2010 at 6:26 AM
dadt posted Fri, 01 January 2010 at 6:28 AM
coltrace posted Fri, 01 January 2010 at 8:04 PM
Great examples there, dadt !
Thanks.
It can look nice if one randomly selects a few vertices and
adds another small group to create a different, less mathmatical look to the outcome.
A few thinner and bendier strands added in can give a more "organic" feel to the render.
hobepaintball posted Sat, 09 January 2010 at 9:56 PM
Attached Link: Dynamic hair and cloth with BVH
With some guidance from the forum I have recalculated the hair dynamics in this animation. please let me know what you think. this uses LuLuLee's dixie hair.
Believable3D posted Tue, 12 January 2010 at 6:35 AM
Now that I have figured out how to get my hair to move with V4, I've been doing a bit more work with the dynamics controls. Here's V4 doing a pretty sharp bend.
For those who aren't aware, the Gravity setting is a bit unintuitive (to me, at least): negative values means stronger gravity, positive values essentially means anti-gravity. So if you want the hair to fall down, you need to slide left. In this little test, I discovered that you probably need to have a bit more gravity than the Hair Room gives you by default if you want hair to fall forward properly in a position such as this. In this image, most of the hair groups are set at about -0.000600. (I think the default is somewhere around -0.000350 IIRC.)
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dadt posted Tue, 12 January 2010 at 7:10 AM
Don't forget that how the hair falls is not only affected by the gravity setting but also by the spring strength, bend resistance, position force and root stiffness.
Believable3D posted Tue, 12 January 2010 at 11:42 AM
Yes. :)
Especially position force and bend resistance, I think.
One of the unfortunate things about the Poser manual is that while they briefly explain the Dynamics Controls parameters, they never give you a hint even what direction does what. (That aside from the fact that their explanations sometimes barely do more than repeat the name of the control, so the uninitiated aren't gonna necessary get it.) And since these are strictly dynamics settings, you get no visual feedback at all until running simulations... which is very time-consuming.
Similarly with the Styling Controls. No real explanation how the Falloff setting works (thankfully I managed to finally find that info on another site).
But my biggest problem remains selection. It seems to be my computer, because I watched a Youtube video and the guy had no problem selecting the hair he wanted. I dunno. Very frustrating, anyway.
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Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:43 AM
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Michael314 posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 5:50 AM
Yes, I started revisiting dynamic hair as well a few days ago, since I read that in the recent
Poser versions it renders much faster than transmapped hair. Plus, for transmapped hair,
80% of all I bought look crappy.
I got the KaiZ collection (currently on sale) here at RMP, also at RDNA
there are currently a lot of dynamic hairstyles for V2 and V3 at low prices.
What should I say - they look much better than most current V4
transmapped hair styles.
Below is my work in progress - the Dixie hair here from RMP.
My intention is to start with bought styles, but to customize them for my renders.
Best regards,
Michael
ice-boy posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 5:53 AM
no offense guy. the hair just doesnt look right. i think its the problem from Poser.
hobepaintball posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 6:31 AM
to me the messy edges and less than perf ect syyling are....Pertfect
Michael314 posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 7:59 AM
Suggestions how to improve them are welcome!
I improved it a bit with more combing, but it's also not yet the color I want.
Best regards,
Michael
Mark@poser posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 8:23 AM
Quote - Thought I'd revive this thread. Hopefully more folks are doing dynamic hair renders now. This is She Who Must Not Be Named wearing one of Adorana's free dynamic hairstyles (for V3, IIRC). I didn't do any styling, but I did replace Adorana's materials with mine.
Can you explain a little more what your material settings were? That's really nice.
Thanks
Mark
carodan posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 11:18 AM
I think one of the problems using existing dynamic hair props is that most were set up some time ago prior to some of the rendering performance developments of the latest versions of Poser (P8 & Ppro2010). They were set up with the limitations of the software at the time.
What I've been starting to find is that we can take some of those props and make some adjustments, namely increasing the number of hairs and reducing the root/tip widths in each dynamic group. Exactly to what degree you might choose to do this will still depend on the particular group and how long you're prepared to wait for a final render.
I took Shena hair by Adorana and upped the number of hairs in some of the top groups to 300-400, and reduced the root/tip widths to 0.2 or 0.3 and 0.1 - see the results of this in the most recent renders in my gallery. What you start to do in this way is produce a head of hair with realistic hair numbers and dimensions.
The drawbacks, aside from render times, are that you find that some of the hair groups may begin to interfere with each other in terms of how the shaders render under certain lighting conditions (over-shadowing becomes a problem in areas, IDL can be interesting). It may be that the approach to making dynamic hair props needs to change somewhat to accommodate what the renderer can do now.
Hair shaders might need some adjustment also - I found that I no longer needed to have the 'opaque in shadow' box ticked on the hair node (the hair was doing this by virtute of the sheer number of hairs). I've also stopped using translucence in the shaders, only using tiny values to create a slight lift to tones where necessary.
TBH I'm not entirely sure how the hair node works, and I've had quite a few unexpected and disappointing results from long renders. Perhaps in time some of the shaders in the material room will need to be upgraded to account for recent advances in lighting and rendering options.
But with Poser 8 and pro2010 a realistic dynamic hair has suddenly become a lot more feasible.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:08 PM
Glad you posted here, Carodan. I saw that note you made about root and tip widths in your gallery and more people should know.
I doubt it can end up as a sticky here, but as I continue to learn I may put up a page of dynamic hair tips on my web site.
BTW, I know it seems there are not a lot of dynamic hairstyles available, but there are more than you might readily find. Not only Dixie (which of course is explicitly advertised as such) and the ones by KaiZ (which you can only discover by actually looking at the product page - I don't think it comes up in search); a number of Adam Thwaites (MostDigitalCreations) characters also come with basic dynamic hairstyles, and his characters prices are very good value.
A tip for you if you use Adam's hairstyles: his as-is material settings will not get you good results, as the hair is far too thick. (I think that's why pretty much all his renders are of black hair, which is easier to make look reasonable.) You will need to either take Carodan's advice above and reduce root and tip widths, or else reduce density by a lot (in my renders, I've cut the density of his hairstyles to about a third of what he had).
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:10 PM
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Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:21 PM
Thanks. I'm just learning; took advice on material settings from a number of people here. I actually forgot to make some pretty important corrections to my material settings - as you'll see I'm using the Alternate_Diffuse channel, but I've got the regular Diffuse_Value set at .63. So I'm violating some good principles. I didn't post to say "what a great render," but more to kickstart the thread. (If you want to see great dynamic hair - not to mention dynamic clothing - renders, take a look at the last few in Carodan's gallery.)
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Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:28 PM
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Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:29 PM
I should add: it seems to me that Adorana's hair does not respond well enough to gravity. I think you need to reduce e.g. Position Force, maybe Bend Resistance etc.
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Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:37 PM
Hm, wait, there's specular on the hair node... I don't think I need Specular_Value on?
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
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carodan posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 12:56 PM
A lot is going to depend on the lighting you use.
P.S. re-hair dynamics - yeah, I had trouble getting the Adorana hair to respond to dynamics (part of the point I guess). It still looked far better than similar transmapped styles though.
Oh, I think I played with the 'clumpiness' settings also - gave it a less perfect feel.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
carodan posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 1:07 PM
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 2:48 PM
Here's my latest render, after I fixed my material settings a bit (and gave it a bit more light). I also downsized the root and tip widths as per Carodan's advice, although I didn't increase the hair counts dramatically.
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
ice-boy posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 2:52 PM
i am noticing that the hair shaders dont have the blinn node. i dont know if this node even works. but look at some pictures from real hair. look what happens when a light is behind hair.
its looks very different then in poser.
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 3:04 PM
I think I tried Blinn early on in my dynamic hair experiments, but didn't care for the results. However, I probably wasn't using it correctly.
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
carodan posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 3:56 PM
I tried a full blown shader setup with blinn but it didn't have the same results as using it on a solid object. I'm not sure for certain how the shading works for the dynamic strands produced in hair groups. I think it's not quite the same as considering it like the mesh surface of a solid object.
We could use some input from bb I suspect.
When you think about it though, a strand of hair is very translucent. It may be that the effect of strong light shining behind hair isn't quite the same as the specular effect you get with the Blinn node in any case. And it's worth remembering that even Blinn is only one model of a surface specular reflection effect. I've been considering this a lot lately with skin, where I've really started to want a more accurate specularity for use with IDL.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
Michael314 posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 3:57 PM
Hello,
I played with the shaders a bit. I like what happens when you replace the noise node by
a clouds node. This gives bigger areas of colors.
The hair node seems to be very special, the color is mainly driven by u/v, but
from the hair root to hair tip, it has some additional parameter you don't get
with other nodes (or, in other words, without the hair node, I was not able to
obtain which changes color from root to tip.)
Carodan, your settings are very aggressive, I also reduced the hair thickness,
but only to 0.6 for root and 0.3 for tip. Your renders look very good, which proves
that the additional reduction is worth it!
I also double the number of hair segments in general, that gives smoother
bends.
It is possible to use an additional blinn or anisotropic for hair, but with too much
light, the hair easily looks washed out / grey then.
With even tiny bits of translucency, the hair did not look good any more.
Best regards,
Michael
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 5:53 PM
I added Blinn to that previous setup. No visible difference whatsoever.
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Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
operaguy posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 6:56 PM
Here's a still from one I am working on now.
::::: Opera :::::
operaguy posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 7:48 PM
Glance-up with dynamic hair
http://jrdonohue.com/mm3.mov
::::: Opera :::::
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 9:34 PM
Looks excellent, operaguy.
Of course, I wanna say you're cheating, because it's easier to get really dark hair to look realistic. :-D
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
operaguy posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 9:48 PM
here comes the blonde.....shortly!
Believable3D posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 10:17 PM
Quote - I tried a full blown shader setup with blinn but it didn't have the same results as using it on a solid object. I'm not sure for certain how the shading works for the dynamic strands produced in hair groups. I think it's not quite the same as considering it like the mesh surface of a solid object.
We could use some input from bb I suspect.When you think about it though, a strand of hair is very translucent. It may be that the effect of strong light shining behind hair isn't quite the same as the specular effect you get with the Blinn node in any case. And it's worth remembering that even Blinn is only one model of a surface specular reflection effect. I've been considering this a lot lately with skin, where I've really started to want a more accurate specularity for use with IDL.
Do you think it would be worthwhile to experiment with very subtle levels of transparency? I can't say I'm seeing much with my translucency settings.
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
carodan posted Sat, 20 March 2010 at 10:29 PM
Problem with translucency in Poser is that it isn't really translucency at all. Poser lacks an accurate translucency shader. That channel on the root node is pretty much an ambient one. Using it just makes the hair glow, which is why in many renders dynamic hair looks quite bright in the shadows - best not to use it at all.
Transparency with hair groups will most likely add a huge amount of time to renders, although I haven't tried. It doesn't strike me as the best solution, but who knows.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
Believable3D posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 12:17 AM
Hm, never thought about the render times. Thing is, I tried partial transparency on ears once, to fake SSS. Of course, that only worked if the key light behind was red, but it actually did have a pretty neat effect. But I'm thinking it may work with hair. No map, just set transparency to a very low %. Just a thought.
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
operaguy posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 3:10 AM
This model started with Kate Hair (included with poser) but I delete the duplicate groups and only work with two, Left and Right. The default setting for Position Strength is .84 and in my opinion that is too limp. I increase it to .95 or so.
::::: Opera :::::
ice-boy posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 5:19 AM
Quote - And it's worth remembering that even Blinn is only one model of a surface specular reflection effect. I've been considering this a lot lately with skin, where I've really started to want a more accurate specularity for use with IDL.
yes i have a feeling that the Blinn shader is not good enough for skin. i am using Bagginsbills blinn settings for the skin. but i have a feeling that my problem is with the blinn node .
i have a feeling that the specular center is to strange.
operaguy posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 5:20 AM
This hair module must be looked at with fresh eyes, as suggested by the posters above. It respects collision, the hair styling tools are sufficient, one you get used to them, the simulation engine is now strong.
With this lighting power, this great female model (V4), great skin (Lana elite) and now this hair....
I've been away from Poser for about a year, but the 120-frame animation i just created with long hair, collision on (the hair pours over her shoulders like water early in the animation)......I am back.
::::: Opera :::::
P.S. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to work into an acceptable render time for the animation and start cooking it.
Michael314 posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 7:38 AM
Best regards,
Michael
mike1950 posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 11:25 AM
WOW ! Dynamic hair is looking so much better than past days. :)
Has anyone tried a hybrid? Say something like transmapped hair for the thick base and dynamic for thinner see through parts? Is something like that even possible? I know nothing about either type of hair but wondered if a hybrid could gather the strengths of each.
Eric Walters posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 2:32 PM
Thanks for starting this thread Believable3d
Nice work Carodan and OperaGuy
As well as a big nod of approval to the humorous efforts of others! :-)
Believable3D posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 4:45 PM
operaguy: Glad to hear that's your experience, but I certainly can't identify with some of what you say. I still have a terrible time with Poser putting hair inside the skull. Selection doesn't work properly for me. And IMO, the styling tools really do need some serious work. So there's a ways to go yet, although I know that I can personally improve with the tools that are available.
mike1950: Hybrid? Well, a lot of people use a textured skullcap. IIRC, Dixie Hair has some additional stuff with textures.
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
operaguy posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 5:19 PM
I am in PoserPro2010 so I'll only speak for that:
Collision must be "on" for the target(s) that the hair will collide against. In the starting position all hair guides should be outside the target mesh. Naturally, "do collisions" must be on in the simulation choices.
Given those conditions, as long as there are normal flowing parameters checked, the hair guides stay outside the mesh.
As to rendered hair "seeming to" penetrate the mesh, I have not had that problem, so if that is what is happening for you can you post an example? Are the guide hairs going through the mesh?
I also have no issues with the select tools in hair styling. Select, deselect, translate, curl, pull longer with length constrain off, respect of tip/root in these operations....no problems.
::::: Opera :::::
Believable3D posted Sun, 21 March 2010 at 5:26 PM
Quote - I am in PoserPro2010 so I'll only speak for that:
Collision must be "on" for the target(s) that the hair will collide against. In the starting position all hair guides should be outside the target mesh. Naturally, "do collisions" must be on in the simulation choices.
Naturally. But that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Quote - Are the guide hairs going through the mesh?
I could post a multitude of examples. Hair penetrating/getting hidden in the forehead, especially, sometimes the cheeks. It happens nearly every render. Whether or not it's the guide hairs or the populated hair, the simulator should detect that.
Quote -
I also have no issues with the select tools in hair styling. Select, deselect, translate, curl, pull longer with length constrain off, respect of tip/root in these operations....no problems.
Yeah, I think there is a special problem between Poser and my system in that regard. I try to select a very small area, and it affects almost the entire head. I dunno what's wrong, but it's very frustrating.
And yes, I'm using PP 2010 (although I haven't tried the selection thing in the release version - I certainly had the problem in Poser Pro, P8 and the PP2010 beta).
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
lululee posted Tue, 06 April 2010 at 11:19 AM
Splendid thread. I think I will get back into dynamic hair. i especially like the hybrid concept.
cheerio
lululee
vincebagna posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 3:51 AM
Quote - I took Shena hair by Adorana and upped the number of hairs in some of the top groups to 300-400, and reduced the root/tip widths to 0.2 or 0.3 and 0.1 - see the results of this in the most recent renders in my gallery. What you start to do in this way is produce a head of hair with realistic hair numbers and dimensions.
Carodan, there is something i don't understand here, you multiply the number of hairs by 300-400 or you add 300 to 400 hairs?
Generally i double the number and get good results, by multiplying by 300 seem out of reach of my computer...
carodan posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 4:59 AM
Quote -
Carodan, there is something i don't understand here, you multiply the number of hairs by 300-400 or you add 300 to 400 hairs?
Generally i double the number and get good results, by multiplying by 300 seem out of reach of my computer...
I'm usually only increasing the number of hairs that high for a couple of groups - the upper ones generally. It has to be quite high because I'm also reducing the root/tip widths - when you render at a high resolution you start to see the thickness of the hairs and they can look too bristly for my eyes at lower res. But you're right, if I try and increase too many groups to that quantity the render bugs out, especially if IDL is being used.
It's really going to depend on how the hair is designed (and how long you're prepared to wait for a render) as to how far you can push things. A lot of dynamic hair doesn't quite work using settings like this because of how the groups sit on top of one another.
Take the 'Shena Hair' that I've been using a lot lately. For my latest renders (that I can't show just yet) I left a lot of the lower hair groups pretty much as they were, but actually raised the number of hairs in the topmost 'Links Oben' and 'Scheitel' groups to 400 whilst reducing their root & tip widths to 0.15 & 0.1 respectively.
The result is that the lower groups with the courser settings act as a kind of backdrop to the upper groups that have a gorgeous fine quality (not unlike real hair). Without the lower groups adding volume you can see straight through the fine top layers to the background.
I just rendered a 1400 x 1000 pixel image with these settings (with quite high render quality) that took a little over 5 hours, but the results are really something in terms of fine detail.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
carodan posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 5:07 AM
I was trying to work out if there's an upper limit to the overall total number of hairs that Poser can actually deal with but I've had varying results as to when a render has failed. It may be that it's dependant on what else is going on in the scene.
I also need to amend something I said earlier about turning off the 'Opaque in Shadow' setting on the hair node - you can't always do this, and not for all groups. I still can't quite get my head around what the hair node is doing. Specular is a bit of a struggle for sure.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
operaguy posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 5:19 AM
my image above, which resulted in fine detail, deployed simply one group over the whole head. The setting was 35,000 hair strands with tip at .2 and root at .3 and took a few hours to render.
The hair was set invisible to raytrace. A shadowmap light with tight settings was on it, however.
If the shot were closer, tip would have to go down to .1 or .15 as Carodan has stated.
the above image fails because of the issues at the scalp, but otherwise shows off wonderful rendering capability of PoserHair in my opinion.
carodan posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 5:32 AM
Probably the reason my renders take a while longer because I leave RayTracing enabled. I haven't tried using depth-mapped shadows - I wish we could have per-object lights in Poser.
One more important factor - shading rate for hair. Best to keep it high via the settings in the object properties (I've been using shading rates of between 5 and 7).
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
Believable3D posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 9:06 AM
Quote -
One more important factor - shading rate for hair. Best to keep it high via the settings in the object properties (I've been using shading rates of between 5 and 7).
Hm, I've been curious about that. The default is 8, which seems inordinately high to me. My logic tells me that high shading rates are going to make the hair blocky and lose detail.
Is your recommendation simply for the sake of render speed, or are you saying such high settings actually help quality somehow (as far as hair goes)?
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
carodan posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 12:26 PM
I'm not a scientist but I have run a few tests. In the test above I couldn't see any discernable visual differences in the second two renders which were both at what I consider to be fairly high and rediculously high shading rates.
The only difference comes with the first one at the shading rate of 0.25, which I usually render most other scene elements at. I can't quite work out whether the horizontal lines that appear are intentional or artifacts.
Notice how, at this very high root width, we can see a jagged structure to the hair strands.
Notice also the effect of the root softening.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
carodan posted Fri, 16 April 2010 at 12:32 PM
One concern I had with relation to shading rate was with the effects of procedural nodes. I notice that most of the hair shaders seem to use a noise node. You might expect a higher shading rate on the hair group to interfere with these effects, but I'm beginning to wonder (in the latest Poser versions at least) if they are working quite as we think they are. More tests to follow.
PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.
www.danielroseartnew.weebly.com
dadt posted Sun, 18 April 2010 at 4:25 AM
Quote ---"Yeah, I think there is a special problem between Poser and my system in that regard. I try to select a very small area, and it affects almost the entire head. I dunno what's wrong, but it's very frustrating."
I have had this problem in the last few weeks and it affects earlier versions of Poser as well as Poser 8,which I currently use. After lots of cussing and hair tearing I remembered that my son bought me a new nVidia graphics card in February to replace my trusty ATI unit, swearing it would give me better performance.
This made me wonder if the open GL was working ok so I tried switching to SreeD and that fixed the problem. I can now select single hairs with no problem
Believable3D posted Sun, 18 April 2010 at 8:52 AM
Interesting. I already had rolled back my drivers because the updated ones lost all my Adobe fonts.
Will try that next time I'm working in the hair room. (Not much 3D time of late.)
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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM
Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3
templargfx posted Sat, 24 April 2010 at 9:24 PM
Getting the hair to look realistic comes more down to your light setup than anything else. a low level IBL is generally the best way to go, so that the hair gets some light from all direction, and low-bias ray-traced blured shadows :p
TemplarGFX
3D Hobbyist since 1996
I use poser native units