i have nearly finnished a hair style  i like but when i do a simulation it goes nuts, i have used cage's bake script, have everything locked in where i want it ,but when i run a simulation  it gets all kinky, way over-active.. are there settings that can calm this down and still retain the collision settings?....i have searched all day here and at dna but only find things pertaining to styling hair not animating it...i have tried every combination of settings i can imagine... im beginning to wonder why its called dynamic hair if you cant simulate dynamics with it..have i wasted my time with this? sure it looks good in the initial pose but i cant imagine spending all this effort for a one-image prop that cant pose or animate... thanks for any help...

i have a sim running now , ill post a pic afterward...

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Without seeing your scene I'm guessing but it sounds like you have strands that are intersecting the skull cap prior to the sim starting.

i was very carefull to avoid intersections when styling but there are a lot of guides involved , may have missed a few ,any tips on finding and fixing this prob?... there are 13 groups , when i ran cage's bake script the hair changed, kinda jumped a distance  off the prop and had to be repositioned  , this may have caused intersections though the before and after renders looked very much the same... thanks for responding im kinda lost trying to consider all the variables involved here... my biggest concern is that im worried there arent any settings that will reasonably simulate hair even if i get a perfect model built , i have been testing settings with an animated sphere prop with just a few hairs on it and still get either 'wild hair' or collisions arent working very well , have i just not found the right gravity/spring/dampening combination that works? or are there such settings ?i have seen hair videos that looked great,(such as the beautifully done video  by toxicwolf which inspired me to give poser hair another shot), but only in distant renders where there wasnt any real detail to consider...

thanks

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Most of the time when this type of jumping occurs bend resistance is too high. Have you tried setting it to 0 and see what happens?

Quote - Most of the time when this type of jumping occurs bend resistance is too high. Have you tried setting it to 0 and see what happens?

 

actually no, i tried setting it higher a few times but didnt like the results and reverted back to the default, ill try 0 and see what happens, i find most of the settings i try have exactly the oposite effect than i was expecting, i have done hair with halfway decent results in max, i suspect poser settings may be the reverse of max..., im not sure.

Thanks

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heres the video by ToxicWolf i referred to earlier... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po5EF1PwtXs ..., i find it fasinating, this guys got it together ....

Getting to know what the parameters do is the biggest hurdle. The other thing is to understand the difference between styling and dynamics. Styling control how the hair looks when nothing influences it. The dynamics control which influence and how much of it - this is resistance from the hair itself (bending resistance, stiffness, etc) and the environment (gravity, air resistance, etc).

I have seen a good hair tutorial in the past, but I can't find it anymore. Most tutorials give you a step by step instruction and do not go into what the parameters actually do and in which order you should use them. That is one reason why it is difficult to get good results.

Best thing to do is to play with a ball and turn each dial seperately to see what actually happens. Do not forget to turn on collisions since that has a big impact

I find the styling the most difficult part because it is pretty unforgiving regarding mistakes. I hope this will improve in the next release

the jumping from cage's script seems to be caused by the skullcap not being in zero position. If you move it to that before running the script, you should be ok.

here are some explainations of the settings http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3881067&ebot_calc_page#message_3881067

There's not specific numbers to set things at but help understanding them.

Also with hair it's a good idea to save often. It's easy to wipe out all your work with a click of the button.

you guys are great your patience is greatly appreciated, if im slow to respond forgive me i have half a dozen tabs open here trying to absorb as much as possible...sometimes i get fixated on something and look up and its hours later....lol

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Don't worry about slow responces. We all understand things take time and poser sometimes has to take a back seat to real life.

so its ok to drape hair as an initial styling then use the bake script to lock it down? im still seeing the displacement when baking after affirming it is centered, i may need to try a diff skullcap this one is slightly off center by default,the origin is visibly off center form the geometry no idea why that is...it was free so i have no complaints, ill  take it into max and center the origin and try it again

interresting side note: ever use the morph tool to style and smooth with? then bake the verts and delete the morph?...it seems to work pretty well fast and accurate, easy to make curls and waves, no effect on the simulation at all that i can see. hell of a lot easier than trying to drag hair around by the end verts, just put the end where you want it and smooth the remainder into place... ill have to play with this more later, im testing this on my hair ball prop btw...

 im running on less than an hour of  sleep in 2 days... can you tell?  i tend to start babbling ...lol

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 heres an initial render and a short clip i made last night after redoing the hair, i recentered  the origin on the skullcap and it still had the same problem with the bake script, so i abandoned the skullcap and created the hair directly on the head(i know this is a no-no) but the results were the same still jumping when baked, perhaps i dont have the latest version of cages script , i dont know...(i was up untill 4:30am)

  anyway i quickly re-created the hair, using an initial drape/bake/morphtool styling/bake/used the hither dial on the camera with backfacing polly's enabled to look inside the model to find and fix any intersections(only a couple easily smoothed to outside the body with the morph tool) rebake again/reposition/double check for penetration/add bvh motion quickly bent arms to cover a prominent breast morph for youtube/simulate using default settings except bend resistance set to 0 and collisions enabled both in hair and body/render....

 overall not so bad other than its still way too lively, the bangs i can just dial back on the dynamics  paramater as theres no real collision issues, but the hair that drapes over the shoulders penetrates if i change the paramaters... so im still in the same basic boat i was in yesterday.... tweak and retest.... i really appreciate you guys offering advice and hope more suggestions are forthcomming... its such a privlage to be part of a community where you can openly share ideas and people are so giving of their time and experience, too bad it doesnt extend more into the 'real world' ...

again and as always ...thank you...

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ps: forgive me my spellcheck isnt working in firefox... :O(

looking really good jafo, how are the render times for the hair?, i haven't tried dynamic hair for a few weeks, but now ive got my faster machine i might have another go, although in the past homemade hair has always caused my system to freeze up lol

How do you use the morph tool? When ever I try to use it on hair the highlights bounce around like a jumping bean on steriods. I start on an end move half an inch and the thing is on the roots half a skull away.

Quote - How do you use the morph tool? When ever I try to use it on hair the highlights bounce around like a jumping bean on steriods. I start on an end move half an inch and the thing is on the roots half a skull away.

 yes this is a major issue, but with patience you can get it to settle where you need it, i work around this by changing camera position or zoom,  the morph tool is not designed for this purpose, perhaps cage can port it to the hair room and work out the kinks for us(hint,hint)the tools are already there , just needs a true wizzard to iron out the bugs... cage and shvrdavid are true gods when it comes to programming, oh and lets not forget about BB and Phil i stand in awe of their accomplishments...

 dont give up you will quickly get the hang of it and wonder why anyone would do it any other way, it soooooo simplifies the process, and you can get the results you want instead of settling for 'thats the best i can do with what i have to work with'...

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Quote - looking really good jafo, how are the render times for the hair?, i haven't tried dynamic hair for a few weeks, but now ive got my faster machine i might have another go, although in the past homemade hair has always caused my system to freeze up lol

 the render is averaging around 1min 45sec per frame but keep in mind this is 720/480 frame size.... sim time is comparable... im running  AMD FX-6400 6core processor with 15gb RAM... just eliminating antivirus and networking(networking stopped because theres no antivirus) from my system shows about a 30% increase in overall performance( this is my personal observation, i am not a computer wiz, and i am not recomending this for everyone)...

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I'll keep trying. The more tools I have under my belt, the better hair I should be able to make. I've got cages hair  to path script and I've getting the hang of the translate hairs tool in the hair room. I figure in about 3 or 4 years I should be skilled in all of them. Maybe it'll go a little fasted with my new computer. Poser is running so muh more smoothly.

i downloaded the hair to path script but havent had a chance to check it out... the morph tool is alot better than it was in pp2010 i find that using smaller brush sizes, lower stregnths and slow movements are best ... im still changing prams and running sims , getting better results, but not quite there yet.... im also finding that its easier if you start with like 10 verts  get those roughed in /double the verts smooth and adjust and repeat untill you reach about 100  it goes pretty fast... seems i can do about twice as much in half the time doing it this way. once i get the prams worked out i think we have this whipped...

oh another note : im getting to a point at times when the morph tool stops working at all.... running the bake script aleiviates this and everything works properly again... maybe the cache gets full and baking clears it?

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this is probably another of my out of the box observations, but wouldn't it be idea if there were a skull cap prop that had the hair zones predefined, top,bangs,side etc so that you could just go into the hair room and tweak the settings to suit your own needs?, i don't know if it is even possible, but i find tbh, the hardest part of the hair room is setting the hair groups onto the skull cap.......

Okay, I've spent an hour searching...where is Cage's Hair baking script?  Thanks :)

is it this one ?

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2798819&page=18

That's not the one.  Thanks though

Quote - is it this one ?

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2798819&page=18

No that's the hair to path scriptthe deformation baking is here

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2839086&page=3#message_3861962

Quote - this is probably another of my out of the box observations, but wouldn't it be idea if there were a skull cap prop that had the hair zones predefined, top,bangs,side etc so that you could just go into the hair room and tweak the settings to suit your own needs?, i don't know if it is even possible, but i find tbh, the hardest part of the hair room is setting the hair groups onto the skull cap.......

 this would be great to have , though i dont think a single speciffic grouping would cover many of the hundreds of hairstyles people would want, but a basic grouped cap would be usefull...more advanced styles would need more advanced skills, and people with these abilities could easily make their own groupings...

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its encouraging to see that people are interrested in this topic and eager to discuss and advise , the more we discuss the more we learn AND the more we send a message to the developers that we need more tools and better defined code, my observation is that they are watching and they DO pick up on cues and go in the direction we steer.. i think they go in the direction of the most interrest, long active discussions pull more weight than short undefined complaints IMHO....i think the hair and cloth rooms are more or less in the beta stages and we need to test and make recomendations as to what improvements are needed to make them viable and fully functional .

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The bake script isn't working for me...

Whether I use styling tools, bake, then drape or whether I drape, bake, then style...it's still resetting the hair.

Am I not understanding what this script is for?

 i think... and its just personal observation... simulation is a seperate process to be done after styling is completed and is controlled by the simulation settings, simulating to get initial drape seems to be helpfull, though it does tend to complicate styling as the strands all settle together and are hard to seperate for individual shaping, using large groups also complicates things IMHO, smaller groups are easier to control and lead to finer detail....

heres an example: its better to make a group that drapes in front of the shoulder and a seperate group that drapes behind, because when interpolation occurs (show populated ) the interpolated strands go through the shoulder and doesnt look very good ,seperating the direction prevents this, the same applies to hair parting you need a left and a right or whatever .... after shaping  use the bake script  to lock everything into the initial state and if you leave the hair room and use the morph tool to better define shape and detail , bake again and delete the morph created by the morph tool( if you dont delete the morph the morph is added to the new shape)

im finding styling to be the easy part, the devil is in the simulation settings....

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im not having the  problem with hair jumping off the surface after baking with other items only the one skullcap and the figure im working with, i think the problem with the figure is that its heavily morphed and perhaps i need to zero the figure and bake the head , its worth a try i guess...

The baking script works on any current actor, not just hair.  The script alters sets the base shape of an actor to match the deformed shape of that actor at the time the script is run.  So if you take M4's head, make him smile, then run the script on the head, you'll get a head that can only stop smiling if you set the smile morph to -1.0.

When used on dynamic hair, it does seem that there can be some complications, but these lie not with the script but with some oddity in how Poser handles dynamic hair.  As far as I can tell, any script which processes hair will do this.  If the hair or its parent (skullcap) have any transforms applied, the hair will seemingly jump to its default worldspace position rather than its default localspace position (relative to its parent).  That's my only guess for the described error.  The workaround would seem to be to avoid running any scripts on dynamic hair which is not in its default position.  Zero all the transforms on the hair and its skullcap and all actors all the way up the actor chain until the hair is where it would be if its skullcap were not parented to anything.

thank you cage for clarifying this ,this script is a welcome addition to my toolbox ,  well developed and tested , now i just need to pay more attention to where i put the read-me's....lol

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i zero'ed the body using the joint editor and ran the bake script  on the head and the hair got really screwed up... but guess what?... i reset all the transforms on the hair and everything popped back into perfect allignment... i love this script ,cage is a godsend...whoda thunk?.... now if i can just figure out this dynamics issue....the problem is the long drapes of hair over the shoulders , the rest can be calmed down using the dynamics paramater dial  for each hair group, i have run tests on a ball prop having it colide with a cylinder prop and get settings that work pretty well with this set of props, but when i transfer the settings to the actual figure they look completely different, im thinking it may be too many collision poly's for the simulator , i think ill try making a lower rez proxy for the collisions and see what happens ...

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Quote - so its ok to drape hair as an initial styling then use the bake script to lock it down? im still seeing the displacement when baking after affirming it is centered, i may need to try a diff skullcap this one is slightly off center by default,the origin is visibly off center form the geometry no idea why that is...it was free so i have no complaints, ill  take it into max and center the origin and try it again

interresting side note: ever use the morph tool to style and smooth with? then bake the verts and delete the morph?...it seems to work pretty well fast and accurate, easy to make curls and waves, no effect on the simulation at all that i can see. hell of a lot easier than trying to drag hair around by the end verts, just put the end where you want it and smooth the remainder into place... ill have to play with this more later, im testing this on my hair ball prop btw...

 im running on less than an hour of  sleep in 2 days... can you tell?  i tend to start babbling ...lol

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you mean, the morph tool instead of the styling tools?

you mean, the morph tool instead of the styling tools?

 i mean, do an intial styling with the styling tools and then leave the hair room and use the morph tools to finish styling( i use the smoothing and the push pull tools in screen mode at low stregnth), then use cages bake script to lock everything down with, it works very well and doesnt seem to affect dynamics...if you mess up and wish to restart just return to hair room and regrow the hair and try again, you can return to the hair room at any time BTW...it takes a few min to get used to using the morph tools on the hair as it isnt designed for this purpose but with patience you will get good results... keep in mind this is experimental and hasnt been thoroughly tested, but innitial results look pretty promising...

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what is the secret to selecting the hairs with the styling tool?, i find for example if i use shrvdavids high res cap and just create say 6 hair groups on it, when i select the styling tool the select hairs button stays illuminated but the other buttons are locked, if i click around randomly for a bit, it seems to eventually decide to let me style "some hairs" but not neccesarily the ones i wanted lol

i drag a selection box around the guides i wish to work with... make sure you dont have 'show populated ' checked when styling as it can be confusing which are the guides and which are the hairs...and it eats resourses and slows down the process... i find it best to work with small selections, i usually make the hair a bit longer than needed and only worry about getting the tips where i want them and leave the hair room and use the  morph tools to smooth the rest into position then return to hair room and work with another selection...IMHO shvrdavids high rez cap is much higher rez than needed, he has a lower rez version that seems adequate for any med to long hairstyle... i may use the hi rez for short hairstyles like crewcuts or buzzcuts ...

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im not having too much luck with the dynamic settings, it seems no matter what i do its  over-active... looks fairly good from a distance but up close it looks like crap..... just for giggles and laughs i extended my frame range and retimed the animation to run at half speed then resimmed ,and rendered every other frame to avi to get it back to the original speed.... it looks twice as good but still is a tad too active... im thinking about tripling the frames  just to see the results... it is a lot of sim time but if the results are good it may be a workable solution (for me) i dont think most people would want to go to these extents for animations but it may be all i can offer for now, besides most people render stills and the only sim would be to get from the default pose to desired pose and only rendering the last frame, so i may recommend simming 10 or more frames to get positioned then an additional 10 or more frames for settling...sim time for me is a tad over a minute per frame..i have known artists to go to greater lengths in their quest for better results... in the past it wasnt unusual to wait days for one frame to render...

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I'm gonna have to try that later. Have to go to an Easter dinner at my in-laws. I'd rather stay home and use Poser. Shoot I'd rather reinstall everything in my runtimes.

Quote - I'm gonna have to try that later. Have to go to an Easter dinner at my in-laws. I'd rather stay home and use Poser. Shoot I'd rather reinstall everything in my runtimes.

LOL...good luck

im getting beautiful results with styling long hair but getting nowhere close to acceptable dynamics ... such a pitty

with short hair i can just turn the dynamics down and it works fine....

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I wonder if the morphs are messing up the dynamics. I don't do alot of simuations. I had good luck with this one. The woman's hair was dynamic. I had her moving like she would have been if she was running and then ran the sim and rendered one frame.

I tried a sim of my pigtails and they wouldn't bend properly. I did use amorph on the pigtails. I know 2 sims isn't much to go on, just a thought.

it could be that the morphs have some effect, but i have been baking after morphing and deleting the morphs ... i guess it could have an unexpected effect tho, i dont know.

i have been simming on a low rez prop without any morphs...just baking..and seeing pretty much the same hyperactivity....didnt poser previously have a button to disable self collisions? seems if you enabled self collisions everything went bezerk....i think this may be the main problem, im seeing activity where the hair isnt touching anything other than itself... i also think there needs to be more user controlable settings like sim steps. and i also think the ability to make and reduce keys would go a long way toward better realism...

i just tried simming on an unmorphed section of hair on my model and i am getting exactly the same results so i doubt its morph related... im suspecting the simulation in poser is just not adequate for this long hair and needs more development.

 im wide open if anyone wants to suggest settings... ill try anything...lol

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i have been scanning the archives here at Rosity and seeing pretty much the same frustration all the way back to poser 5 when dynamic hair was introduced... things have shown improvement but theres a long way to go before this dynamic hair is fully usable.

is there any way to export dynamic hair that works...is there a converter out there ?

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Export it? You mean like an obj?

yes to .obj    exporting from poser doesnt work ...it would have to be converted somehow...i saw a thread somewhere that mentioned it but cant find it now. a py script i think

if i could convert it i would just make it into a fig

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would be great if we could just kill the dynamics and just have collisions and gravity working, they seem to work fine

I have a script called hair_to_prop that I believe does that. It's been awhile. I'll test it once the simulation I'm running finishes.

im running a sim with no styling at all(default settings 20 verts per hair hair length at 1) letting hair just drape and sim, no movement at all, still seeing large amounts of activity, so its not the morph tool nor the bake...

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getting no hits in search of rendo with hair_to_prop going back 20 yrs

Keep in mind if you do get it converted, it's gonna have a ridiculously high poly count.