I figured out a simple 5 minute trick to add loose strands to transmapped hair to add in some realism. It's best described by looking at the picture (I think if you click on it , the picure will expand to show the hair strands better). The hair is KOZ's All Back. The AFTER is with the technique applied. Look at the top outer edges of the hair for the effect. I'm pleased with it but would like some feedback. I could post the steps on how I did it if anyone else is interested, so let me know. I think this would work on other hairs too. I did the render with the ray traced option for the hairs off in both images, but it should work with the option turned on also.

Thanks
Mark

It would be interesting.  However, I see that you have quite a bit of AO artifacts in your demo render.  I'm wondering if you correct for that, will the hair effect not work afterwards.

Interesting idea .... and a nice morph of Jeri Ryan.

Quote - It would be interesting.  However, I see that you have quite a bit of AO artifacts in your demo render.  I'm wondering if you correct for that, will the hair effect not work afterwards.

I think it will. My somewhat outdated PC takes a while to render on, so these are pretty low quality. I'll try a higher quality render over night and see how it comes out.

Thanks

Did you do the morph of Jeri Ryan?

Quote - Did you do the morph of Jeri Ryan?

Yes.

Quote - > Quote - It would be interesting.  However, I see that you have quite a bit of AO artifacts in your demo render.  I'm wondering if you correct for that, will the hair effect not work afterwards.

I think it will. My somewhat outdated PC takes a while to render on, so these are pretty low quality. I'll try a higher quality render over night and see how it comes out.

Thanks

two options:

• you are doing it wrong
  -you have commodore 64(20 year old computer)

based on your render that you posted it should not take longer then 1 hour with a slow computer. with a new computer under 5 minutes.

and i see that you have anisotropic on the eyes. this is not the right specular effect for eyes. try the ''glossy'' node. i think it will look better.

for the hair i would need to know what you did there. it looks interesting.

did you copy the hair ?

I would have to see a better quality render to know whether it's worthwhile, I think.

But personally, I've virtually abandoned transmapped hair, anyway.

There was a thread on this subject a while ago, I think - or it may have been mentioned in passing in a thread about something else, which explains why I can no longer find it. So yes, I would like to hear more about your method. I have never ventured into the hair room yet, but I'm hoping it may offer a good way of adding messiness to a transmapped hair prop.

two options:

• you are doing it wrong
  -you have commodore 64(20 year old computer)

SM dropped support for the Commodore64 with Poser8. A sad day.

I would like to see a good render because personally I hate hair that is too perfect. People always point out the hair as the worst part of any render unless I use dynamic hair or paint it in photoshop, which I can't do easily in animations, well ok I don't have the skill to do it in animations at all

I did a higher quality render last night. This was with raytracings set to 3 and pixel samples set to 3. I still did not turn on raytracing for the hair however, so I will do that today and see what happens. The loose strands are still visible and the effect still looks good to me. The render I posted below took about 1 hour on my PC.

For those of you interested., here's how I did it. Basically, you follow these steps:

1. Generate a obj copy of the hair. You do this by going under FILE> EXPORT>OBJ. Select only the hair. Deselect all options for export. Call it My_Hair or something and note what directory you put it into.

2. Load the obj hair back in. This is under FILE> IMPORT>OBJ. Deselect all options. The hair should come back in exactly on top of the hair you had before. Some of the textures may come back, but in P7, I noticed the transmaps did not come in. That's okay. If the hair originally was a prop, you may be able to just duplicate what's on the figure rather than doing this and step 1.

3. Copy over the existing shader network under the material for the original hair to the new obj form. Go to the MATERIAL room and selected everything for the chosen hair portion. Go to your new hair and for the same group paste it in place. The idea here is to have essentially two copies of the hair in place on the head when you're finished with the same shaders for each.

4. Add in a new visibility shader as shown in my next post for the new hair. This runs streaks thru the existing visibility transmap (black lines) so that only a few fine hair strands are visible. The All Back hair has the hair strands running essentially vertical, so the mapping was done to insert vertical gaps in the hair transmap. With other hair styles, this may not work, but most I've seen are vertical.I used the tile shader, but there may be something better.

5. Scale the new hair slightly larger than the old hair. To see the new strands you need to raise the new hair up. I scaled the hair in size a few percent and then a few more in Y Scale. I think you could just move it up also.

 

It may help to tint the hair a red or green during the first few renders to see the size and aid in more strands or more spread between. them.  I'm sure some people here will figure out improvements to this. Please post those.

 

Good luck

Here's the modifications I made to the transmaps to allow only a few strands of the new hair to show thru. I'm sure this can be improved upon.

 

Again I'm just trying to share an idea here with the community that has given me so much. Hopefully someone can take the idea and improve upon it. If you do perhaps you can share it.

 

I have to go to work now, so I'll run a another render with the ray tracing for the hair on and see what I get from it.

Thanks

That's very clever.  Excellent morph, too.  :wub:

nice idea,although i thought instead of increasing the size of the loose hair obj you were going to add a displacement map so that the hair wouldnt follow the curves of the underlying hair and could stick out more naturally... perhaps thats an idea???

I shall be exploring this nice idea to add to my hair shader that i have yet to release as my shader uses only the hair hair transparency and not a texture map, thus allowing for light to follow individual strands when the light is moved......but your idea will add a little more to the realism.....hmmmm (will appear in free stuff, i have no interest in selling)

This is an early render of a texure free hair im making.... you can see from the two middle shots that the light has moved and is effected properly by the light

Quote - nice idea,although i thought instead of increasing the size of the loose hair obj you were going to add a displacement map so that the hair wouldnt follow the curves of the underlying hair and could stick out more naturally... perhaps thats an idea???

I shall be exploring this nice idea to add to my hair shader that i have yet to release as my shader uses only the hair hair transparency and not a texture map, thus allowing for light to follow individual strands when the light is moved......but your idea will add a little more to the realism.....hmmmm (will appear in free stuff, i have no interest in selling)

I Iike that idea. I would like to see some variation in the height of the hair strands too. I'll experiment some....Thanks

also alot of hair comes with morphs, try morphing the hair then exporting as an obj, then you will have a different shaped strand layer