Tutorial: Creating realistic Carrara hair for animations and still renders
Jonstark
Posts: 2,738
Carrara hair is incredibly realistic since it is strand based, and is dynamic as well, meaning that it is interactive with scene forces and therefore ideally suited for animations as well as still renders. However the hair room can be intimidating to use, and finding the right settings for realistic hair movement while animated can initially be difficult.
Over the past week (thanks in large part to PhilW's tutorial series) I feel like I've had a breakthrough in understanding the Carrara hair room and what settings to employ to achieve realistic hair movement/simulations. Check out a few of these test animations to see my progress (I've made mistakes on some of these that I now know how to correct and do better, but I'll just show them anyway to give an idea):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofWd1iAfv4c (my very first hair animation test)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oq7GW9X_IU (tucking hair behind her ear, I made a fairly basic mistake on this one that I know how to correct now)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbq-yv-ieJA (a more complex hair style used on this one, where the proxy figure tucks hair behind her ear again)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDD_AgW6-Fg (hair blowing in the 'wind' through the application of directional force.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePlppX0Zx9I (V4 going from pose to pose, movement of hair as she moves)
The really great news is that creating Carrara hair and animating it is incredibly easy and quick once you understand a few of the tools and the basic concepts and settings for your animations. Seriously, I'm doing hair sims that take less than a minute to calculate (usually less than half a minute) and doing test render animations that take less than 5 minutes to render to see how the hair is moving and refine settings.
Carrara hair:
- Looks far more real than prop/figure hair (actually Carrara hair with the right settings just looks real, period)
- Renders faster than prop and figure hair
- Will animate easily and be far more realistic than any sort of prop hair
- In my opinion is the best dynamic strand-based hair solution within the hobbyist-priced software level, and in fact the simulation quality of what Carrara can do with the right settings is on a par with what you see in CG movies by professionals.
The really great thing is that Carrara hair is actually very easy to use, I would say even easier than prop hair and figuring out all the endless morphs and parameters for prop/figure hair, and Carrara hair is far more natural and realistic. So I wanted to put together a tutorial to quickly show, using a very simple hairstyle, how easy Carrara hair is to create, use and pose for animations, and to show which tools in the hair room you need to know how to use, as well as give some settings for realistic natural hair movement within animations. And animated hair can be stopped at any given frame to do incredibly realistic still renders too, so this stuff isn't just for animators.
I've broken the tutorial into parts for ease in viewing, but bear in mind that even though overall this tutorial is more than an hour long, this is only because I'm trying to take the time to explain all the tools and settings as it goes. In real life, once you've mastered these tools, you can build an animate this hair very quickly - maybe 5 minutes to create and animate the hair simulation, and another 5 minutes to render out a 4 second animation.
Another tutorial will follow sometime soon (when I have time to put it together) giving more details of how to make more complex hairstyles, but I'm hoping that just playing with creating a very simple and quick hairstyle will give people some familiarity with the hair room and how easy and quick it is to work with Carrara hair and achieve highly realistic hair renders and animations.
Carrara Hair Tutorial part 1: Overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC1AV-hcsC4
Carrara Hair Tutorial part 2: Scene setup and Low Poly Proxy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNHOTqi07fE
Carrara Hair Tutorial part 3: Grow Region Tool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av4OvvgEbHg
Carrara Hair Tutorial part 4: Guide Hair Tools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZiHp603ypM
Cararra Hair Tutorial part 5: Brush and Push tools, Dynamic Draping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IndFuzP4_IM
Carrara Hair Tutorial part 6: Cut and Length and Straighten tools, Auto Grouping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzYjkgkA_fM
Hair Tutorial part 7, Hair simulation and animation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd3AI71JGh4
Edit: I also made an add-on side tutorial on the importance of the number of hair segments you choose to use and showing my thoughts on what the ideal number should be for natural looking bends and curves in your hair motion and sims. Forgot to post this one initially, just adding it in:
Carrara Hair Segments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK5riUH3kEQ
I'm also realizing I forgot to mention the 'Density' setting in the Simulations tab and what that does. It doesn't actually add thickness to the hair or number of hairs, but instead changes the simulations as if there were more hair density (which impacts the way the hair moves). I completely forgot to mention what this parameter does in the tutorial but it's such a small description that I'm not sure it warrants another tutorial video all on it's own.
Edit: Adding a link to the 2nd tutorial here too, which is for a slightly more complex hairstyle, and which goes over hair shaders and the other hair room tools not covered in the 1st tutorial It can be found here:
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Comments
Wow !! Excellent !! Thanks Jonstark. Something I've been needing for a long time.
Thank you, Jonstark! Very generous of you. I will watch them and use them soon. I probably won't do much of a test until after this month's challenge because I am doing a toon render and the dynamic hair does not work well with toon, in my limited experience. My other challenge entry won't have people. But if you don't mind, I will post some attempts to apply your tutorial insights to this thread when I get a chance.
Thank you again.
Very nice Jonstark!
I just watched the whole set - you do a fantastic job of explaining simply. I can't wait for the more advanced hair tutorials. Unfortunately, playing around myself will have to wait for the weekend, but you've got me genuinely excited about it. :)
Mark
Jon, this looks great(video clips) and I will look at these tutorials over the next couple of days.
Jon,
I have just viewed four of them. Really excellent and a very ambitious launching of your tutorials - and as it appears from the previous posts you have just acquired the screen casting/ editing software. How did you do so much in such a short time? Turning out one would have been an achievement.
I did not know that Dynamic Hair grows 5,000 hairs no matter how large or small the area. I will view more tomorrow, when my brain is fresh and not seeing double.
Thanks Jon...
Starboardtack
super useful, thanks :-)
That is the default number of hairs and can be easily changed in the hair room, or even in the Assembly room when the hair object is selected.
Thanks guys! I do hope it will be as useful (and fun) to play with as it has been for me so far. I really am excited about how easy hair is to use and animate, and my hope is that if more people start using it and rendering with it, then others who are considering Carrara will see those renders, and the cycle and userbase will grow. Maybe Daz will someday start to take us more seriously? Nah, I'm dreaming... Then again it seems lately to me that there are workarounds to make the existing version of Carrara do almost anything. I've been so impressed with the latest discoveries about how to use bullet softbody for dynamic clothing, for example.
Wow Mark, you watched them all already? I thought surely I was boring everyone to tears with the length of it, and tried to break it up into smaller pieces so as not to be too boring. On the other hand, I've already realized there were several things I left out that I really should have mentioned, and further testing makes me want to add in additional notes about other things I've discovered... For example I figured out what I think is kind of a nifty cheat in using the density grow/decrease tools that can help sell a hairstyle as being comprised of more hairs while still keeping the actual count low... I guess I'll fold it into the next set when going into the more advanced hairstyles.
I hope you'll have a blast playing with it when you get a chance. I never get tired of playing with it (well so far, I've really only been at this for less than a week now, but it makes it a lot more fun when I was frustrated by not understanding how to use the tools). I think you'll have a lot of fun when you get a chance to play.
Thanks Mike! You're tutorials were some of the ones that inspired me to try my hand at 'giving back' to the Carrara community, I hope they are of use for you. :)
Thank you very much msteaka for the kind words. Yeah, I basically spent nearly all of Saturday night screwing up tutorials and starting over each time I sounded like an idiot. I discovered that my main rendering laptop has only a headphone jack, not a microphone jack (and so would only use the embedded crappy mike in the laptop), and so the first time I played myself back the sound was horrible and you either couldn't hear me as I was mumbling or if I said anything with the a hard 'S' was like an assault on the ears.
So I installed the same screen capture software on my other laptop, which I use only for work, and it would have been comical for anyone to see me trying to press the two mouses at the exact same instance to start and pause recording my voice while recording the video. It wasn't at all the fault of the screencapture software, but more the fault of my laptop, but it was absolutely exhausting, and I have new respect for those of you who do tutorials like this because it was really easy to sound like a total idiot, say something wrong, go blank while I was speaking, etc. It was much more wearing than I expected, but at a certain point even though I was dead tired I was also of the mood 'I am going to see this through, dammit' and pushed through til I found a natural stopping point. Then spent a long time second guessing myself about how they could have been much better and more engaging and intelligent, but finally said 'the heck with it' and decided to post :) And in the final result, the sound still isn't very good, but it's miles better than what it was when I started at least.
It will likely be several days up to a week before I can find the time to do the second and more advanced hair tutorial. I really want to do more testing and refining anyway. There are a few things that I think I might have initially got wrong in my first pass. For example, I started out using too many guide hairs, then in the tutorials I recommend scaling back to about 35 to 40, but now I'm thinking maybe upping that to 60 or 75. Not much harm in having a few more, it won't cost much time on doing simulations and guide hairs don't make any difference to the render time, and sometimes a few more guide hairs make for a more natural movement,, so why not? Anyway, stuff like that :)
Thanks magaremoto! :)
That is the default number of hairs and can be easily changed in the hair room, or even in the Assembly room when the hair object is selected.
Evil is 100% right, and later in the tutorials hopefully it's clear when I change the default number of hairs, sorry if my wording in that part was misleading, all I was trying to convey is that drawing a larger growth region will not change the overall number of hairs from the default, but you can at any time increase the number of hairs in either the hair room or in the assembly room in the hair count tab (and you don't have redo simulations or anything at all, it just will cost some render time). As I mention, I started off with ridiculously high hair counts to be close to reality (I read on google that some people have 100,000 or more hairs so I was using numbers like that) but we don't have to go nearly that high to get realistic effect. To be honest though 5000 is awfully low, so you probably will want to up the hair count a little. :)
Watched them. Great job. I have to watch again and write down some of the setting suggestions. I think some of my own frustrations came from sticking relatively close to default settings. Thanks for the perseverance! And the tuts
Evil is 100% right, and later in the tutorials hopefully it's clear when I change the default number of hairs, sorry if my wording in that part was misleading, all I was trying to convey is that drawing a larger growth region will not change the overall number of hairs from the default, but you can at any time increase the number of hairs in either the hair room or in the assembly room in the hair count tab (and you don't have redo simulations or anything at all, it just will cost some render time). As I mention, I started off with ridiculously high hair counts to be close to reality (I read on google that some people have 100,000 or more hairs so I was using numbers like that) but we don't have to go nearly that high to get realistic effect. To be honest though 5000 is awfully low, so you probably will want to up the hair count a little. :)
It's good to know that you can increase the hair count and still keep the simulation. It may be a way for me to play around with animating the hair on my creaky old machine- Simulate with a low hair count, and then turn it up when it is time to render.
Evil is 100% right, and later in the tutorials hopefully it's clear when I change the default number of hairs, sorry if my wording in that part was misleading, all I was trying to convey is that drawing a larger growth region will not change the overall number of hairs from the default, but you can at any time increase the number of hairs in either the hair room or in the assembly room in the hair count tab (and you don't have redo simulations or anything at all, it just will cost some render time). As I mention, I started off with ridiculously high hair counts to be close to reality (I read on google that some people have 100,000 or more hairs so I was using numbers like that) but we don't have to go nearly that high to get realistic effect. To be honest though 5000 is awfully low, so you probably will want to up the hair count a little. :)
It's good to know that you can increase the hair count and still keep the simulation. It may be a way for me to play around with animating the hair on my creaky old machine- Simulate with a low hair count, and then turn it up when it is time to render.
I'm on a laptop with an i7 quad core which hyperthreads to 8 cores, so I realize I've got a pretty decently powerful laptop, but the hair sims themselves I'm running are taking less than 30 seconds to run (usually less than 20 seconds), and once they've been run you can see the effect just scrubbing through the animation in the assembly room without rendering at all if you need to. I really do think this is something that is do-able even on a lower powered machine without having to wait forever to see results.
The hair count you choose won't affect the simulation time that I can see, btw, it just increases render time. Adding more guide hairs with more segments will increase the simulation time but not the render time, conversely.
You can also run the simulation, and any changes to not just the hair count but also to the hair shader (for example if you add a wave or kink or something) don't have anything to do with the simulation at all, and you can see the effect right away. It's both a benefit and a drawback, as if you make the hair thicker with a wave or kinks or something then since the hairs are now instructed to follow the guide hair 'at a distance' then some of the hairs will actually move into the V4 head region during the simulation. Still very useful to see the effects, all in the assembly room without having to render anything.
For the fur on my Dec contest entry I had a count of 150000 and 200000 on different parts of the Robe.
They were short but there were a lot with about 10000 guide hairs.
I'm glad you brought up fur, because I'll be the first to admit I haven't explored in that direction at all yet (so let me confess my ignorance :) )
Just extrapolating for what long hair sims need and what I've learned in that arena, I'm guessing that you would need a lot more hairs to cover the Robe due to the larger surface area. And if you wanted the ability to brush all those different areas and style them as you like, it would make sense to add many more guide hairs accordingly, so you would have a lot of variety in the way the fur fell on the coat. Plus if you're not doing a simulation for an animation, you can have as many dynamic hairs as you want, so that you can get as precise as you want on the details of the way each bit of hair/fur looks. Even if you did do a simulation, for something as short as fur you need a lot less segments per hair, which dramatically cuts the amount of calculations done too, so even animating something as with a large number of guide hairs might not be any longer to simulate than doing a long hair simulation, or at least comparable I think.
All of this is pure speculation, so I'll have to test it out to see, since I've never done any fur before I could just be talking out of my you-know-what :)
Jon,
These lessons are very thorough. I like it when you make mistakes and have to go back and make corrections. This I believe is a very effective learning tool. Learning what not to do is as important as learning to to do it right. I learn best by making notes - goes back to my school days...way back. So I have been making notes as I go through the lessons. I think what is of course immensely important is the settings that you are giving for optimal effect and why. You must have gone through a lot of trial and error to derive these numbers.I know that I am going to appreciate these settings for years to come..Thanks for sharing it with us.
It is amazing that you were able to pull it off considering the "laptop" fiasco. The handicaps seem to have kept piling on. To be honest the sound is not bad- I would never have guessed that it was coming from the built in mike of a laptop. However a decent shotgun mic would certainly make your life easier.
Ii have been immersed in my own project for the past week ,of converting a figure and I am at the level where I am beginning to add hair. So your tutorials are both timely and of intense interest. Thanks again for all your hard work.
Starboardtack
Fantastic, Jon!
Thank you for helping to demystify what I've been doing to screw mine up so radically over my short, failed tests with this tool! LOL
Just like you said... try it with stuff at their defaults... stray a bit to try and improve it, but it gets worse... then give up! LOL
One of my biggest issues was that I get flickering in the renders when I use the shaders to make that really curly hair that you've seen that I like so much. I actually had a simulation once that was working very smoothly. But then, after struggling so hard against the flicker effect, I tried making straight hair simulations and just could not get rid of that flicker! LOL
At that point, I knew I was just not using the tool right. I've come back to it once since then....
After watching these tutorials, I can easily see a few things that just never dawned on me. Cool! It's going to be fun to try again! Thanks!
FYI: If you crank your moude wheel again, and it really screws it up badly, there is yet another cool tool: Reset Hair tool simply makes all of the guide hairs stick straight out, perpendicular to the mesh, just like they were after you've placed them. That can be a great point at which to restyle the hair, if you wish to.
Also, when the hair seems to be opposing atmosphere in the simulation, it's actually reacting according to its physical properties settings. So if you want more drag, you could increase the friction of either the hair or the V4 Proxy. I was amazed at how fun it was to mess with these settings. So as a guide, I just looked at each of the material presets to see how they were set up with the sliders, which was pretty much what I would have expected, if I recall correctly.
This can help for times when you want to make, say, a wet hair simulation - you can make it stick to the figure more. And etc.,
Great tutorials though. Straight to the point (Very much unlike someone I know! LOL ) and really informative and complete. I Love it! :)
I completely did not know this at all! Lol, after reading your post I had to go out and play, and of course I spent a lot of my free time these past couple of days doing more tests. This is awesome, and while it might seem obvious in retrospect I don't think I would have thought to adjust these settings in a million years, even though I know they are important for other types of physics. Thanks, Dart! You are awesome, this little bit extra can *really* add to what you can achieve in simulations! :)
Thanks msteaka, to be honest there was (and still is) a fair bit of trial and error just as you describe, plus I'm finding that the settings need to be subtly changed for certain hairstyles that need to retain shape (work goes forward though). I really do hope that it's of use to others, and as much fun to play with for you as it has been for me.
Oh... and one more thing:
If you wish to run dynamic hair in a scene filled with objects, go through ALL of those scene objects and set them to not collide with hairs! I learned this the hard way!
I was wondering why the hair was just going everywhere :ahhh:
Then I've discovered that my skydome was colliding with hair, and that was the culprit! Amazing!
Jonstark,
I attempted to load a Carrara file with a low polygon Genesis envelope to Sharecg.
See here.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/79449/view/5/3D-Model/Genesis-Crude-Envelope-Mesh-for-Proxy-Hair-Sims
Let me know if you have trouble getting it. This is the first time I am trying to share something.
The mesh is not grouped or uvmapped because of the intended use as just a proxy. You can delete the legs etc. if you believe the typical hair style will only interact with the neck, shoulders, fingers, etc. You can use Studio's transfer utility to make it a conforming figure. I show how to do that in the "Best practices" thread. The thread also shows how to save as a wearable preset so that it loads in Carrara. That way, if people morph the Genesis into a troll or something, the envelope will morph with it. There is still the problem of the hair cap not morphing with genesis, but I wouldn't think it would be a big deal for people to just use the scale tools for that.
Let me know if this is along the lines that you want, or if you think some changes would be helpful. From the forum talk, I take it people are satisfied with using a low res V4 that is already available. Do you have what you need now?
BTW, now you have a simple base from which to make other custom item for genesis.
Works for me...and thank you. I was in the process of making one of these, but this saves me the trouble
Great. I'm glad you were able to download the freebie. Hope you find it useful.
We went through this a year or two ago, and, as I remember it, there was very little enthusiasm about the possibility of animation with dynamic hair then, due to enormous rendering times. And animation is all I do. So I forgot about it.
But suddenly you, Jonstark, reveal to us the fact that animation is possible! Now everything is changed. Along with PhilW, you have showed us the way. Now I absolutely want my characters to wear animated dynamic hair!
Can't wait for your next tutorial!
That's awesome Diomede, thank you so much! :) I just downloaded and loaded it, was playing around adding hair to it, and it seems absolutely perfect for the purpose. I know almost zero about the way to turn this into a conforming figure, I'll have to go read up on the 'Best practices' thread (it's got to be linked in Dart's collection of useful info, right?). I'm also thinking with this in the zero pose, I can easily pull it into shape that it could also be an envelope for V4/M4, Genesis2, etc. This will likely make for a great proxy hair object for anything humanoid, actually, and with a common 'base' we can now develop a library of Carrara hair that will work with any figure (all that matters is that it has the same number of polys on the head, and we can push/pull/deform the head to suit any figure it might be 'riding' on).
Obviously I know I have a fair bit of work ahead of me learning how to rig this, but hopefully it won't be too difficult :) I'll try to grab some time later tonight to start playing around, hopefully I'll be able to adapt my next hair tutorial for more complex hairstyle and do it on this proxy object instead, I'm very excited about this :)
Thank you again, this is awesome!
And render time can actually be much faster than the old transparency-based hair props/figures too, it's like a win-win :) Although render time can be slowed by a much more complex hairstyle, and particularly if we were to add a huge number of hairs to the figure, but for most purposes in animation I'm finding we don't really have to stray too far about 5k - 15k max for the hair count, which means the renders really still do fly. Of course I know you've got that 24 core render monster, so I'm betting your machine can *really* crank out renders fast (I've got a pretty good 4 core i7 laptop, which is hyperthreaded to 8 cores, but nowhere near your level of power... I wish!)
Really glad it is of use to you, and maybe by the end of the weekend if I'm lucky, or sometime early next week, I'll be able to do the 2nd tutorial. I should have a few hours tonight and tomorrow, so hopefully...
In the meantime, here's a quick teaser of the kind of more complex hairstyle I'm talking about; in this one I've also gone a little longer with the animation to include some 'wind' forces and see their effects as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3PgxGv7-rc
Great progress with the wind effects, Jon. You have me very excited about the potential of strand based hair. Here is a step by step explanation of taking the envelope and using Studio's transfer utility to adapt it for use as a conforming and morphing genesis item in Carrara.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45361/#676987
For Genesis and Genesis 2 stuff, I would recommend a traditional prop haircap of just the scalp as the base for the hair. The reason is because the low-poly envelope is going to be deforming with Genesis, and on genesis that has caused problems for some hair attempts. Worst kind of problem - the "only sometimes" kind. Having said that, the low poly envelope can still serve its purpose of replacing the neck, shoulders, etc. in what the hair collides against. The hair cap can just be widened along the x axis or whatever as needed.
I am by no mean adept at this kind of hair, so what I said in the above paragraph could easily be from my own ineptitude. Please ignore that if you have any reason to believe the envelope will remain a stable hair platform after it becomes conformable to genesis.