Digital Art Zone

The hair feature yields wild results.  I’m applying hair to a .OBJ head mesh imported from FaceGen.  I’m also following the tutorials from Infinite Skills (which are really good, BTW). 

One problem is that, unlike the tutorial, there are no hair guides by default.  I have to go in and add them myself.  Not tragic, but adds more effort and slowness to each attempt.

The next problem is that the hair misbehaves like CRAZY, to the point that it seems it is a worthless function. 

Are others routinely successful?  Or is it a game of numbers, where you have to keep re-trying until one comes out reasonably well?

I created a short hair piece, and after cutting hairs, everything was splotchy, showing bald patches, or other sections where the hair would be 8 inches long.  If I were out to make zombies, this would look cool. 

I attempted to create a long hair style for a female character.  I thought I was doing okay, but whenever I’d show the generated hairs, it looked like the model was in a wind tunnel with hair groups whipped in every direction.

Is there anyway to tame this hair so that it becomes a reliable tool?

Sounds like maybe the obj has it’s normals flipped the wrong way…? Can you bring it into the model room and check the normals?

The head OBJ’s from faceGen are pretty low poly, as I recall. so..
as well as checking the Normals direction,.. you may want to consider copying the top of the object and creating a new vertex model “hair cap” which you can then tessellate / sub divide to increase the resolution.
You can then grow the hair onto that and parent it to the face-gen head.

To answer the rest of you’re questions, yes, hair works, and you should be able to see, and brush it into shape, in the hair room.
you can also shape the hair with the Hair shaders which can produce curls waves clumping effects and kinking.

Hope it helps

Thanks for the commment about the Infinite Skills training - I’m the author!

There may be a couple of things happening here. One is that the UV mapping may be messed up (I’m not familiar with FaceGen so I couldn’t comment one way or the other), which would lead to the same hair appearing on multple sections of the model or otherwise being erratic. If the mapping consists of lots of “islands” of texture rather than being a contiguous surface, this may be the issue.

The second could be Carrara itself - I have heard of issues with Carrara 8 with hair that were not present in Carrara 7.  I don’t think this is your issue, but it may not be helping.

Not sure that either of these actually helps you resolve the issues you are having, but it may help explain them!