I confess: I'm obsessed with hair, or at least Poser hair.

The other day, I put in a P12 feature request for something like Blender's particle-based hair system. I actually like the way the strand-based hair from Poser's Hair Room looks, as such, which is a big reason why I keep going back to it even though I have literally dozens of transmapped hair products. Blender's particle hair construction is similar (I think) but the approach is much more robust.

Poser's problem of course is that the Hair Room doesn't even have the two most basic styling tools required to style hair properly — comb/brush, or scissors. (Ideally, both would work across multiple groups, but now I'm really dreaming....)

I suspect that the way the software is written even those basic styling tools are pretty much an impossibility, or presumably, they would have been included long ago.

That styling issue is why I find the Hair Room so aggravating, and why I keep trying to reuse other people's very outdated hair for old figures and see how far I can push them. Long, long ago, Adorana thankfully somehow managed to do Hair Room styles (for V3) where the hair itself at least looked natural without being extraordinarily messy. (Any time I've got far toward getting a style that is largely the "shape" I want, by then there's usually quite a mess of hair everywhere, not to mention uneditable "flyaways" floating around.)

Unfortunately, many of Adorana's styles themselves were a bit ... odd, or at least unusual.

The most notable exception is Shena hair, so I keep coming back to that and seeing what I can do with it, trying to push the realism as far as I can.

In this particular case, I've done a great deal of work with it — not just reducing the root and tip widths (and correspondingly upping the hair density), but also lengthening the hair and giving it a bit of kink (Shena hair by default looks just a little bit too perfect to my eye). The kink made the bangs look out of place, so I had to do a bit further work in terms of moving those strands downwards at the roots. That made a bit of scalp show, so I then also made a second copy of the hair. On the copy, I got rid of most of the groups, just retaining the second set of bangs and the groups near the front at the top. I dialled back the density on these but set the root thicknesses a bit higher, and then translated the groups around to fill in the exposed scalp.

And of course, I swapped out the default materials.

It's still recognizable as Shena hair, I think, but more natural, I think. Still not 100% happy with the bangs, and second copy probably made the front top hair just a bit too thick, but I think it looks pretty good. Note though that this is an in-progress render; it's already been going for a few hours, and is still showing the Path Tracing Sample as 142/576.

I also have a pretty nice blonde render from before I did a lot of the more ambitious alterations. On that version, you can see why I ended up having to do further work with the bangs. I'll probably post that too.

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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