Well, this is the strangest thing and I'm wondering if it's a known issue.

I've developed a Hair Room hairstyle with three versions (basic, wavy and curly). I got my fundamental basic version and then mostly worked with the wavy version, doing renders of a whole bunch of different materials for a full range of natural colours—over 20 in all, including black. Until I began working closely on the non-wavy version, I didn't notice issues with the darker colours: the black roots seem to be turning pretty much transparent and revealing the scalp/skullcap.

I didn't notice the problem at first because it's fairly subtle in this wavy version, but if you look closely you'll see the difference. I'll post a "basic" version of the black shortly, and then it will be really obvious.

It's to be underscored that the only difference between these two renders is the black material vs the blonde, and there is no transparency anywhere in the material settings. I'd like to know if anyone else has experienced this and if there's a solution, because if I weren't already bald, I'd be pulling my own hair out too....

I'm tring to decide whether this is optical illusion or not. At any rate, this is the basic style and even though the darker colour isn't black, you can see the difference. I'm sure I could solve this if I went considerably higher with my densities, but then the hair begins a solid mat, which I'm trying to avoid.

D'oh. I think I realized what my issue was. Had root softness set at .15. The blonde is .08....

Well, I guess I've learned something from your talking to yourself here ! Heh heh.  But seriously, I'm taking note about the effect of the root softness setting. Glad you got it figured out.

Wanted to reply to this before but needed to check my old setups. Unfortunately I had to do a complete re-install of Poser combined with other problems that caused delay.

Yes, the softness setting is quite crucial. I used to set it really low (0.02-0.05) depending on the hair and root/tip settings. With very low root/tip settings you can drop it to 0 but then you need to really increase the population density of your hair groups.

Some camera angles can result in you being able to see straight through a style. It's one of the reasons I began using significantly higher populated hair settings too.

 

Getting good results with DH, like so much in Poser, is a delicate balancing act.

Apropos nothing in this thread, I just want Poser to have a way to make a hair cut with an even edge. I have never seen a real-life hair style where the cutting was done by banging the hair tips between two rocks. That's what long Poser hair always looks like to me.

Quote - Apropos nothing in this thread, I just want Poser to have a way to make a hair cut with an even edge. I have never seen a real-life hair style where the cutting was done by banging the hair tips between two rocks. That's what long Poser hair always looks like to me.

Yeah, I'd love the Hair Room to have some real development. No idea how realistic a wish that might be.

It may well be possible as it is to style cleaner cuts by using lower length variance settings but frankly I gave up trying to style my own - the tools are just too frustrating.

Having a way to cut an even edge won't help. It has to do with the way poser fills in between the guide hairs. I made the guide hairs as even as possible, styling each strand to line it up with the side of a square and I still get these results. I have a zero in length variance. The strands are kind of wirey because I made them think so you can see what I did.

I know that acutting tool will likely get a straighter edge that what I can but unless they redo the way the stands fill in it won't make the hair look less torn off at the bottom.

I discovered that reducing root softness does not wholly solve my issue (although it's a bit improvement). I take your point, carodan, on camera angles, but I don't think that's the issue in this particular case, since I've been rendering different materials with exactly the same camera position. The blonde materials are rendering far better than the dark ones.

There's not much difference in the shaders, though, other than colour. I do have a Spots node plugged into a ColorRamp to give some color variation, and I have differing Spot Sizes. I wouldn't think that would have anything to do with this, would it?

Re wished-for improvements to the Hair Room. FWIW, the Garibaldi plugin for DAZ, which seems to use something analogous (but not compatible) for 3Delight to the sort of geometry Poser uses for hair files, has a scissor tool as well as numerous other real world sort of styling tools. I don't think the hair itself delivers quite the believability as really well done Poser hair, but the styling is certainly a huge step up from what is presently possible in the Hair Room.

FWIW, here's my Hair Room wishlist I posted at RDNA:

• Ability to select and style multiple groups, including portions thereof (similar to how morphing tool in Pose Room now works).
• Hairbrush tool.
• Scissors tool.
• Mirror grouping and styling.
• More randomization/variance options in the Growth Controls.
• Options to retain styling when changing Growth Control settings.
• Allow growth of guide hairs when more polygons are added to a group.
• Native ability to save a hair pose from any simulation frame as a zero frame hair object.
• Context menu (right-click) with a visibility toggle for unselected hair (or at least unselected groups), e.g. Hide/Unhide Unselected Hair [Groups].
• More control over user preferences (e.g. control over default Minimum Shading Rate of new hair groups—the default 8.00 is awful, and I shouldn't have to remember to override it every time).

The above would go a long way toward making the Hair Room a whole lot more usable. I definitely think new possibilities would be opened up in terms of possible real-world styles. I actually bought a magazine of hairstyles for reference for my Hair Room work, but I think most of them are going to very difficult if not impossible to approximate at present.

I think you copied my list rather than yours.

Seriously, has anyone every contacted SM reguarding making these changes? We talk about them here a lot but they are more likely to notice if someone actually goes through proper channels.

Reguarding the transparency thing, have you tried rendering the light hair over a darker background to make sure the hair really isn't just blending in with the background better?

No, that's not the case, given the angle of the render.

Perhaps it'll be more obvious here. And don't be mistaken about the background. This was not rendered over white. It's transparent because it was saved as a png and then later put onto a white background. The actual background I see in Poser is the default grey (I'm rendering in a room, but it's invisible to camera).

The thing is, the ones with the weird transparency are all dark colours. I'm sure there's significance to that. It's almost like Poser is looking at the dark colours in my ColorRamp and thinking: Black. Transparent. But surely that's not the case.

I'll try to post my shaders in a minute.

Here's the shader from the midnight brown above.

FWIW, I detached the Spots node to see if it was contributing in any way, and I still had the same issue.