Forum: Poser 11 / Poser Pro 11 OFFICIAL Technical


Subject: Question about Prop hair

RAMWorks opened this issue on Apr 18, 2022 ยท 6 posts


RAMWorks posted Mon, 18 April 2022 at 11:33 PM

Hiya,

I have a question about props.  I made some short fro hair for L'Homme that will be included in my Jon pack. 

I made a skullcap for him and have it set up with morphs that follow allot of my home grown morphs, expressions and Denise's morph pack but the fro hair is fibermesh so transferring any morphs into it has been a huge failure so far and I'm not even sure if I can make this a conformer without it either exploding or getting very weighty. 

Right now it's around 25 megs just as a prop and it's set up for L'Homme's default head shape but not  sure how to proceed with getting it set up to fit other head shapes along with the skullcap that it will be parented too.

If there is a way I'd love to know.  Has anyone had any luck getting morphs into fiber based stuff? 

Here is a render of Jon and the hair.... Rendered in Superfly, Poser 11




---Wolff On The Prowl---

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NikKelly posted Tue, 19 April 2022 at 6:54 AM

Not a clue about the hair-cap thing but, yes, that's a 'Handsome Dude' !!

FWIW, what Superfly render settings did you use, and about how long did job run ??


RAMWorks posted Tue, 19 April 2022 at 9:19 AM

The Superfly settings are the default as they render pretty quickly, I have some lights in the scene that I set up.  

Thank you for the compliment on Jon.  

---Wolff On The Prowl---

My Store is HERE

My Freebies are HERE  


Boni posted Tue, 19 April 2022 at 5:17 PM

Haven't worked with fiberbased hair like this before so this is just theory. IF the hair is attached to a cap ... theoretically it should follow what morphs you make for the cap thus avoiding morphing the hair itself.  I may be way off here.  Just a thought. 


Boni



"Be Hero to Yourself" -- Peter Tork


primorge posted Tue, 19 April 2022 at 7:22 PM

I'm going to assume you are using Zbrush. I've done quite a bit of morphing of fibermesh hair conformers, setting the morphs up to superconform or follow the morph dials of the figure. Most of my work there was with brows and eyelash conformers.

If you are trying to use some copy morphs process I would forget that route. You'll have to set up the morphs by creating the matching morph(s) by hand in your sculpting app and naming them identical (internal name) as the morph(s) contained in the target figure.

You'll want to mask or freeze the underlying mesh so that only the fibermesh and cap are effected by your brush. The introduction of a cap actually makes the process of creating fibermesh morphs a bit more tricky. You'll want to have your brush set up so it effects volumes rather than surfaces.

Zbrush's brushes by default effect volumes...

...so the brush is grabbing both the fibermesh en masse and the underlaying geometry. There's no cap in these examples so the brush is effecting the head mesh too. Masking would probably be best with Zbrush.

Blender's sculpting tools are very similar in action by default. That is by volume. There is some automasking by topology options but just straight selection or brush derived masking is best here...

Mudbox is a bit different in that it's brushes effect surface/volume or just surface or just volume. It's my preferred app for morphing and painting/projection for Poser for a variety of reasons. Here the brush is effecting volume. Masking or freezing would be the approach I would go also...


3DCoat is a bit of an outlier for me. At present I use it (or am learning to use it) for retopo and painting and UVs. By default it also effects volumes...

Probably not what you want to hear but if I were developing a fibermesh hair product with the intent of distribution I would have skipped the cap entirely. Downside is that a manageable fibermesh hair is a bit sparse and you could fill in that sparseness with a textured cap. You could skip the cap and have the "fill" hair texture as an option to the included L'Homme head textures. Morphing both the finicky fibermesh AND the cap to match numerous morphs seems like a ponderous additional thing to labor at. Just my opinion.



RAMWorks posted Wed, 20 April 2022 at 9:37 AM

Yes, the skullcap is textured to look like very short fro hair and gives a nicer transition for the fiber hair.  

@Boni, hope you are doing well hon.  No, sadly the only thing a prop can do is follow along with things like scaling so if I were to use the Scale dials then the hair would follow but as it is that wasn't what I was after.

@ Primorge, yes quite familiar with ZBrush but remember this is Poser 11, it balks at anything that it struggles with and the back and forth between the program using the bridge proved to be too much, crashy crash crash crash.  So I gave up on that too.  

What I did do is SUCCESS in getting the hair set up as a conformer and I did get the copy morphs to work, I loaded them in in 4 goes total, only loading in about 5 or 6 morphs at a time.  So all of Denise's needed morphs will be there as well as my Gino and Jon face head shapes (I really try not to alter too much with those (same with earlobes so earrings don't have to have allot of adjustment morphs)) then copied in morphs like LH Scale and all the bits like that. 

Sadly, the final outcome was the size.  It was over 200 Mb's with the morphs saved out to a PMD file.  The prop itself is only about 20 Megs (which I'm going to include in the Props folder as it works perfectly with LH's default head shape and nicely enough with Gino and Jon without morphs except for Jon's hair line as he has more of an African head slope as part of the morph I created for LH).

I guess it could have been worse but I'll have to put a note in the Readme esp for those using Poser 11 as there are those with limited system resources and then there are issues with Poser 11 memory allocation which has been resolved in Poser 12 but I develop strictly in Poser 11 to give folks that are waiting to upgrade some good products.  BUT, MOST will work in Poser 11 from Poser 12 but you'll get those warning messages but most of the time it's all good.  

---Wolff On The Prowl---

My Store is HERE

My Freebies are HERE