My experiments show that the hair strands, without fail, intersect the body or face whenever given the opportunity to do so.  Is this feature completely broken?  Thanks.

You need to check "Collision detection" for each actor, in the actor properties tab, before the hair will collide with anything.  A bit more awkward than setting up collisions for cloth, not an obvious step to take, but once taken collsions seem to work nicely.

(This one had me stumped, too, until only recently.  :lol:)

Ah, there it is, thanks Cage.  So obvious and yet so elusive.

And so unnecessary...lol.

Wonder why they didn't allow you to click that just once in the dynamic hair tab like cloth?

Laurie

Time. The more body sections your activate for collision detection, the longer the simulation takes to run per frame.

Well, further experiments show that the hair often bypasses the collision detection anyway, which renders the entire hair room just about useless no matter how much faster it renders. 

Worse, the hair often goes springy when it collides with shoulders, even with all the spring settings 0'ed out, maxed out, whatever you try.

It's almost good, this hair room...unfortunately almost isn't good enough.

If we want the hair room to be better it's a case of badgering SM & the dev teams to make it more usable & less of a dark art. I think it's worth the effort.

Quote - If we want the hair room to be better it's a case of badgering SM & the dev teams to make it more usable & less of a dark art. I think it's worth the effort.

It isn't precisely bugged, for the most part.  It's just badly neglected, and has been, for a very long time.

How can we go about badgering them to improve it?  If they don't consider reported issues to be bugs, they may ignore tickets opened with customer support.  Some of them read these forums, but who knows if they really pay attention to discussions like these?

Maybe if we start a petition among users, or something.  :unsure:

I think it's probably a question of weight of numbers that's going to influence a feature enhancement like this - squeeky wheels and all that. For the most part I bet the hair room is just too much of a faff for most users so they don't ever really considering making a fuss about seeing it improved.

I don't really know how the Poser dev teams work or how they decide what they're going  to develop/enhance, but like most people they probably likeat least in part to be inspired. I can't help thinking that sending them some cool renders showing the potential of what is already there and working, along with some documented process with explanations of what doesn't work so well and suggestions for improvements could go a long way to inspiring some action. I'm thinking positive & constructive criticism. Just thinking about what might prick their curiosity more than anything else.

I think it's no bad strategy to put some effort into a report, pooling a whole range of issues from different users, rather than just gathering names petitioning for development. Effort inspiring effort perhaps, plus they'd have a good starting point based on people who (try) to use a feature on a regular basis.

A lot of the issues with hair room are not the hair room itself, but ancillary settings that make the hair room automatically crappy by default.  I'm having endless problems getting the hair's shadows to come off properly.  As it stands, the hair's shadows are either blocthty or noisy.

I'd like a seperate app altogether, like Clo3d, where I could grow and style the hair in real-time then import it back into Poser. 

Anyone want to write it?

May be that there are lighting based issues associated with DH, but then that's all part of enhancing the feature.

Quote - I'd like a seperate app altogether, like Clo3d, where I could grow and style the hair in real-time then import it back into Poser. 
Anyone want to write it?

I've been suggesting something like that for some time.  So far, no one with the programming skills has shown any interest.  :sad:

would be nice to see some lovley straight silky looking shiny hair.

Love esther

I've found the Hair Room buggier than ever in the new versions of Poser.  I think when the hair intersects things it's supposed to collide with, it's a memory issue.  And maybe the new Poser is more of a memory hog or something. 

Dynamic hair has always been buggier than dynamic cloth, but it's worse than ever now.

I think the programmers developed a backwards philosophy to how it should work.  They seem to want you to rely more on the style tools than the dynamic simulation and the direction guides. 

Meanwhile, if you style after simulation, it resets the hair entirely.  Truth be told, without real time dynamics, the style tools are useless for any sort of detail work.

Quote - Meanwhile, if you style after simulation, it resets the hair entirely.  Truth be told, without real time dynamics, the style tools are useless for any sort of detail work.

I thought only the "growth" tools in the Hair Room would reset any existing styling.    If any and every Hair Room tool resets everything, things are worse than I thought.  :scared:

I agree that the whole process is awkward and seems like it was only half-heartedly tacked on.  The core of the Hair Room is a plugin licensed for use with Poser.  The actual Poser part wasn't developed well and has been pretty much ignored since Poser 5, aside from the periodic update which allegedly improves speed or collision accuracy.

I agree with carodan: we really, really need to find a way to get the dev team to pay attention to the Hair Room and Poser's dynamic hair in general. 

Quote - I think the programmers developed a backwards philosophy to how it should work.  They seem to want you to rely more on the style tools than the dynamic simulation and the direction guides. 

Meanwhile, if you style after simulation, it resets the hair entirely.  Truth be told, without real time dynamics, the style tools are useless for any sort of detail work.

 

I've been thinking much the same thing. You want dynamics to play as much a part in creating a style as the other tools, and certainly the collisions need to be improved. This is one of the main areas I'd like to see developed.

I also think another look at the hair node wouldn't go amiss.

Kirwyn had some interesting insights on dynamic hair.  This was from back in the Poser 5 days or so, but nothing seems to have changed.

He found some ways to avoid using the styling controls.  I'm not really much of a modeller, so I didn't understand exactly what he did, but something about how the mesh is joined and how it's rotated can help control the direction the hair flows without using the styling controls.  Also, he found making the skullcap sit inside the head works well to make the hair lie flat without using the pull down styling controls.  The first few vertices of the hair are not affected by collisions, so this doesn't cause a problem.

Number of Hairs, Tip Width, Root Width, Clumpiness, Kink Strength, Kink Scale, and Kink Delay can be adjusted after running the simulation without screwing it up. "Verts per hair" cannot.  Touch that dial, and you'll have to re-run the sim.

From my experiance, you can use anything in the styling controls or the cynamic controls without wiping out the style. However drastically changing some of these will affect how the style looks just like someone with fine kinky hair will look different on the same style as someone with thick straight hair.

Collisions seem to be more of a scrunch up the end of the line so it doesn't continue into the object it like a straw wrapper still on the straw. If the push it down on the table it crumples. My attempts to move hair with a prop have failed miserably.

Attached Link: a small dynamic hair animation

Carodan- how do you make it seem so thick. When I use IDL I get a character in need of Rogain! :-)

 Let's form a "Hair Club" for Poser. Keep posting experiments and results!

I dramatically increase the hair density settings while lowering root/tip widths. The closer you get to a realistic density (90000 to 110000 hairs distributed across all hair groups) the more it seems to reveal shortcomings in styling and dynamics. 

I'm fairly sure the implementation of DH in Poser wasn't intended to be pushed quite this far, but the fact that it can now with reasonable render times suggests different ways that I'd 'like' to be able to use it.

Eric Walters - in many ways what you have there doesn't look so bad to my eyes compared to DH renders from a few years ago. What I ususally notice when I increase the density is uniformness of how the hair flows resulting from having too few guide hairs grown on a very low poly skullcap. You get unnaturally perfect lines when the hair is clumped or kinked, or incredibly smooth (almost solid looking) masses.

It'd be nice to have a way of randomising the final density of hair if very few guide hairs are used. So far my best results have been based on medium to high density skullcaps where there are more guide hairs to create busier looking flows of strands, crossing each other here and there. When the final density is rendered it takes on a more natural mass. Even with very styled hair there's a degree of chaos in how hair sits on the head - we need ways of balancing styling and randomness.

The down side of higher poly skullcaps is that with more guide hairs the dynamic sims tend to run much more slowly, especially if the verts per hair is at a reasonable value. Long hair can take an age to run through a sim, and then the results are often crazy.

Oh, I think I realised where the dark/blotchy looking shadow problem lies, but I don't have a solution. Because there's no simulation of the translucence of real hair in the hair node, no light is passing through. Usually we'd expect there to be lighter, softer shadows because of this, but even with bounce light from IDL the RT shadows remain dark. You can add transparency to the hair or drop the shadow strength a little, but this has knock-on effects that don't really work too well for me. You don't notice it so much with shorter styles, but it's really a problem with shoulder length hair like this.

Quote -  

Oh, I think I realised where the dark/blotchy looking shadow problem lies, but I don't have a solution.

How about a very dim point light flanking the neck on both sides?

That is indeed an option. I tend to be a little averse to adding extra lights to a scene.

I'm also thinking along the lines of possible improvements to suggest to SM that could be made to the hair shader in terms of translucency.

If we can get hair/materials interacting with lights to some degree of accuracy then we can eliminate the need for additional lights.

Are any of you having this problem?

You save it, and when Poser is done saving it turns off "Show Populated" and shifts all the hair groups away from your model?

Quote - Are any of you having this problem?

You save it, and when Poser is done saving it turns off "Show Populated" and shifts all the hair groups away from your model?

IME, that happens all the time.  Been that way since Poser 5.  It looks bad, but don't worry, the hair is fine.  What you see in preview is not what you get.

Took forever to render, though, but I can probably streamline the hair itself a bit...in fact, going to have to if I want to finish it.

Let's see if I can remember and post all the factors...

Okay, so I have two point lights in the scene with the same settings as shown here.

Shadow .7, Ray trace shadows on, shadow blur radius 20, shadow samples 25, shadow min bias .8

Ambient Occlusion On.

The Hair properties I changed the shading rate to .5 and I turned off Light Emitter.

Render settings:  2 bounces and 50 irradiance caching

Well, you can see.  I think it's worlds better, yeah?

Indirect Light Yes, Quality 80, pixel samples 6, Min shading rate .10

Ug.  Here's the setting pic:

Nevermind the setting pic...too big to post here and too useless to shrink.  Work continues, if interest grows I'll compile it better later.

That's happened to me since I used Poser and I'm using 8. It must have made its way into 9 as well. As soon as I switch rooms or move the camera it goes back to normal.

Hair looks great so far, btw ;).

Laurie

This is a LOT closer to what I'm going for, but the top is being difficult at the part.  Based on someone's comments, I've abandoned trying to sim the hair and am just using the styling tools.

Quote - Based on someone's comments, I've abandoned trying to sim the hair and am just using the styling tools.

Were you trying to use the simulation as part of the styling and shaping process?  IIRC, the Poser documentation advises against that, and it really doesn't work under normal circumstances.

If you really need to do it that way, though, the hair geometry can be "baked" using a Python script, to integrate any simulation dynamics into the styling.  I posted a script which will do that in another dynamic hair thread, not too long ago.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2839086&page=3

It's toward the bottom of the page, at the link.  The scalp prop should be in its default position if you apply the script to the hair, which means the figure shouldn't have body or hip translated or rotated and the torso chain from hip to head should be zeroed, if the scalp prop is parented to the head.  (I'd suggest backing up your work before running the script if you use it, because there's no undo for this.)

Personally, for styling hair, I like Cage's hair to path Script. It's still a work in progress and he's not happy with it, so he won't recomend it. It's hard to select specific hairs bt once you do, it can make styling those hairs much easier. I think it runs circles around the hair room tools. Was able to create the attatched hair with it.

William_the_Bloody - coming along nicely.

Yeah, I think using dynamic sims as part of the styling process is too random at present - you just can't control it enough.

Wish I had more time to mess about with this.

I remembered one of the ways Kirwyn used to style the hair without using the styling controls.

To keep the hair out of the face, he rotated the skullcap back about 30 degrees before importing it into Poser from his modeling program.  He grew the hair, then rotated the skullcap forward again, and the hair would naturally fall back away from the face.

I think you can do it within Poser, too.  The orientation of the skullcap when you grow the hair affects the direction the hair flows in.

i only used styling tools to shrink the bangs and pull the sides.

William_the_Bloody: for the bald stripe at the part: Either subdivide the faces in that region so the distance between the two groups is smaller, or have the two growth groups overlap by one row of faces.

Lara, I haven't run into a limit with the verts yet. It may depend on your computer's resources. That style looks good. keeping it simple is a great idea.

Quote - I remembered one of the ways Kirwyn used to style the hair without using the styling controls.

To keep the hair out of the face, he rotated the skullcap back about 30 degrees before importing it into Poser from his modeling program.  He grew the hair, then rotated the skullcap forward again, and the hair would naturally fall back away from the face.

I think you can do it within Poser, too.  The orientation of the skullcap when you grow the hair affects the direction the hair flows in.

 

it grows in the direction of the normals for the polyface?  or the vert?

MistyLaraPrincess - I've had up to 100 verts per hair on one of my tests, but wouldn't try running a dynamic sim on that. Took a while to render but looked very nice.

Here's a question, do guide hairs collide with each other during sims? I'm assuming they do.

back in p6, it seemed to me the hair had to be in the same hair group to collide.  when i overlapping hair groups to better cover scalp, they wouldn't collide.

i wouldn't mind posing guide hairs via a parameter translation dial, rather than move it via simulation.   it's frustrating waiting for a simulation to run every time i load a hair.  theoretically, a parameter dial would allow for stored animated poses for the hair.

i want to check if the bent head makes my pc crash.

Quote - Hey, I think I've got the shadows under control!

Took forever to render, though, but I can probably streamline the hair itself a bit...in fact, going to have to if I want to finish it.

Let's see if I can remember and post all the factors...

 

 

how many verts do you use for this hair?  it falls nicely.

I am using 100 verts per group.  Sims didn't slow down all that much for me when I was doing them, but I was doing static sims.