Digital Art Zone

(Working in Poser 8, PC)
I have noticed that the hair density on V4 is much better than that of the Poser models. I’m guessing it is because V4 has more polygons to work with. Is there a way of increasing the polygons on Jessi’s head or cap?

Isn’t the hair density dial working for you?

Yes, to a point. But it always has a thin look. To keep the scalp from showing through I can increase the root thickness, but up close the hairs look funny. Oddly, Jessi from P6 has better hair growth than the Poser 8 figure (Alyssa?), but V4 seems to have the hairs closer together or something. I can live with it I guess, I was wondering what the options were…

VolcanicMink - 26 November 2012 04:47 PM

Yes, to a point. But it always has a thin look. To keep the scalp from showing through I can increase the root thickness, but up close the hairs look funny. Oddly, Jessi from P6 has better hair growth than the Poser 8 figure (Alyssa?), but V4 seems to have the hairs closer together or something. I can live with it I guess, I was wondering what the options were…

The number of hair setting depends on the polygon size. That is the reason why it looks thinner with the same setting.

If I remember correctly there was a change in how hair was rendered in 8. During the render the hair strand width now depends on how far away the camera is (far away the hair strands renders thinner). In previous versions the hair was always rendered in the same size regardless how far away the camera is. So you need to render the hair to see the actual thickness

So either create a hair cap in a modeler and subdivide it (make it have smaller polygons) or increase the number of hairs.
Creating a hair cap is - for personal use - pretty easy if you have a modeler application - just import the head and keep the top which the hair cap should be and delete the rest of the head. Then subdivide it to give you smaller polygons. Then export it and use this obj as the hair cap and build your hair on it. Set it to invisible to prevent the cap itself from rendering

Your problem probably isn’t with the hair.

Go into your render settings and uncheck Gamma correction.

pwiecek - 26 November 2012 10:06 PM

Your problem probably isn’t with the hair.

Go into your render settings and uncheck Gamma correction.

Hair in the hair room almost never uses transmaps, so the gamma correction would not make any difference in the thickness of the hair

For hair room hair, I found that I had to increase the density of purchased items (ASC Christmas, Snow Bunny etc.) by a factor of 10 to 100. This started to give a hexagonal pattern to the hair and I had to decrease or eliminate the clumpiness.

pwiecek - 26 November 2012 10:06 PM

Go into your render settings and uncheck Gamma correction.

Why would someone want to do that?  As Wim notes, that’s only an issue with transmapped hair, easily fixed by setting the gamma for the transmap to 1.0 in the Material room.  There is a script to do it automagically for all trans and bump maps called ChangeGamma under Material Mods…

EDIT of course, the OP is using Poser 8, which doesn’t have render Gamma correction…

WandW - 28 November 2012 12:46 PM

pwiecek - 26 November 2012 10:06 PM

Go into your render settings and uncheck Gamma correction.

Why would someone want to do that?  As Wim notes, that’s only an issue with transmapped hair, easily fixed by setting the gamma for the transmap to 1.0 in the Material room.  There is a script to do it automagically for all trans and bump maps called ChangeGamma under Material Mods…

EDIT of course, the OP is using Poser 8, which doesn’t have render Gamma correction…

I had a problem with transmapped hair looking washed out. Sometimes it looked as though the scalp was showing through. The description of the original problem sounded like the same thing.

The default Gamma Correction value (2.20) in poser 2010 & 2012 is set up for something called “Linear Workflow”. If you’re using it then the Default Gamma Correction is fine. If you don’t use linear workflow, you should turn it off.

pwiecek - 28 November 2012 03:02 PM

The default Gamma Correction value (2.20) in poser 2010 & 2012 is set up for something called “Linear Workflow”. If you’re using it then the Default Gamma Correction is fine. If you don’t use linear workflow, you should turn it off.

Linear Workflow is simply correcting for the nonlinearity of the display colour space at render time, rather than trying to adjust the materials and lighting.  It does require ‘uncorrecting’ non-colour maps, such as transparency and displacement maps, which the ChangeGamma script does….

WandW - 29 November 2012 08:39 AM

pwiecek - 28 November 2012 03:02 PM

The default Gamma Correction value (2.20) in poser 2010 & 2012 is set up for something called “Linear Workflow”. If you’re using it then the Default Gamma Correction is fine. If you don’t use linear workflow, you should turn it off.

Linear Workflow is simply correcting for the nonlinearity of the display colour space at render time, rather than trying to adjust the materials and lighting.  It does require ‘uncorrecting’ non-colour maps, such as transparency and displacement maps, which the ChangeGamma script does….

Ahh… OK…

I was trying to uncorrect the textures. I never thought that the Gamma Correction was messing up the trans map, but that makes absolute sense.

Now, is the correct approach to gamma correct the individual trans maps and create new ones or apply the gamma correction in the nodes of Poser 2012?

Is the value I’m looking for 1/(2.2) = 0.455 ?

Thanks for your help.

ADDED LATER

OK, it looks like the answers above work so don’t bother answering unless I’m missing something.

Thanks again.