Is there a way to trim individual loose strands of hair?
If you're finding it hard to comb style curves if they are spawned passing through the surface geometry then try turning of these options:
Geometry Intersection check: if style curves control points are allowed to pass through the geometry when combing.
Geometry Occlusion culling: if curves control points are editable that are obscured by the surface geometry when combing.
If you require to remove any excess hair then paint the areas the follicles are spawned black in the density texture.
... but is it possible to isolate sections of hair and apply different colors?
You can by creating a colour paint texture map and set it as the base/tip colour of your hair in the distribution workspace.
You can also export and import the texture and edit in an external image editor if desired...
I believe that it's explained somewhere in a post in the thread...
Real written documentation will be coming over the next few weeks as most of the outstanding issues are fixed.
For that hair style you might want to give the auto parting feature a try. Just turn down the angle threshold in the auto parting option section of the style workspace. I find around 100 degrees is a setting that works well.
Maybe there can be a delete strand in the Style menu to be able to accurately get rid of the whole strand?
If you want to remove hair strands then you can edit the hair density map. If you find it hard to visualise where the hairs are in the paint workspace then there an option to view the style curves why painting.
With antialiasing off, Ge Force Go 7300 (like, seven years old?) handles the plugin fine.
Well technically even older cards should work and when anti aliasing turned off these older cards may perform a reasonable amount.
The thing is that I don't want have to support issues that might arise with these older cards and need to cut things off somewhere. If your willing to take the risk then garibaldi should work fine with your card. I need to be realistic and draw the line somewhere...
So the official support is nvida/amd/ati/intel cards that support OpenGL 3.0 or above.
I just bought a Radeon HD 2400 for 8gpb (13usd) to add to my nvidia geforce 8400 in my low end test machine. These are slowest OpenGL 3 cards you can basically buy and even the high res examples are reasonably functional with antialiasing turned on. (although I do need to fix a slight geometry shading issue with the old ati card).
[ Edited: 14 November 2012 05:47 PM by futurebiscuit ]
Garibaldi Express Beta 6 has just been sent out to beta testers.
Although this version fixes issues, adds some optimizations and also adds some minor features (check the included Readme text), they're a particular feature I would like to highlight for testing...
Previously Garibaldi Express did various on the fly optimizations to try to reduce memory usage during rendering. But for Beta 6 this has been taken to the next level of sophistication with many new additional optimizations...
To activate the new optimizations go into the 'Render Method' parameter in your daz studio nodes and change the value to 'Disk Cache'.
The 'RAM Cache' option is basically the same render method from beta5 and is still the default.
The plan for beta 7 is to make the 'Disk Cache' mode the default.
Here is one of the existing examples rendered in Win XP 32bit with a peak memory usage of 735MB of memory.
For comparision the same scene without the hair has a peak usage of 425MB of memory.
(150918 Hairs with 5096805 verticies).
(note that they're still outstanding issues with rendering rendering with 32bit windows and is not currently supported).
[ Edited: 14 November 2012 09:38 PM by futurebiscuit ]
I love the Beat 6 release , so smooth without any issues or crash , render fast 150K hair in 5 sec with shadow maps
also used the disk cache !! great
and my favorite tool allow me to work freely and style without any drag , I am already on win8 and so far did not noticed any major issues
I will check out tomorrow the readme and make the tests you ask for to focus on
I love the Beat 6 release , so smooth without any issues or crash , render fast 150K hair in 5 sec with shadow maps
also used the disk cache !! great
and my favorite tool allow me to work freely and style without any drag , I am already on win8 and so far did not noticed any major issues
I will check out tomorrow the readme and make the tests you ask for to focus on
Welcome back... Hope you have recovered from the weather releated issues.
5 seconds? what are you rendering?
I have tried a BUNCH of times to render the second image, and there are ALWAYS the same 2-4 squares (depending on the method - sprial, circular, horizontal, etc) that just will NOT render. It gets to 99% and won't finish, so I can't save as a png or anything else. Haven't a clue why this is happening or if it has ANYTHING to do with the plugin or if it's my computer. It's weird that it is the same squares every time. Tried cutting out some of the hairs in that section but it doesn't matter. I can't get these squares to render ARRRGH!!
So I did some touchup in Photoshop with the clone tool, to try to hide them
Anyway, here are my 2 attempts at the hair. Really loving it!!
Hi Alisa, not sure if this will help but I do know that when I was doing displacement fur that increasing the bucket size would fix a similar issue. It may be worth trying.
I was told by someoneat the time that it was likely a bug in the renderer causing the problem which I did report on mantis. Can't remember what happened though...it's a while back now!
I'll try that, thanks!
I remember that...
There's a bit more to the 'problem', though...
It's got to do with not only bucket size, but also render dimensions and 'partial' buckets.
It shouldn't happen at any combination that results in 'full' buckets...so a bucket size of 16 and an image size of 1024 x 2048 would work., but a 1000 x 2000 would probably have the problem. It's most likely to occur when the displacement puts a pixel into the 'next' row/column and there isn't a full 'bucket' to handle it.
Also, if that sweater is using a displacement map, it may be the cause, not the hair. Have you tried to render on an unclothed 'defait figure/
Interesting...I didn't realise it was due to the size of the render but that would make sense. Also that the sweater may be what's causing the issue...nice catch MJC!
It's more to do with the buckets being 'whole' buckets...so as long as the render size and bucket size are evenly matched, there shouldn't be a problem. 'Power of 2' sizes work well...16, 32, 64 for bucket size and at least the perpendicular to 'bucket order' size should also be power of two...256, 512, 1024, 2048,,,,also, when evenly matched there may be a slight increase in render speed (I've never tested or seen it...but I haven't looked for it, either).
lol...I did get that. Sorry if I explained myself badly my brain tends to be fried after working all day. I find that interesting I knew that was important for games that images were power of two...just didn't know it applied to DS also.
It's more to do with the buckets being 'whole' buckets...so as long as the render size and bucket size are evenly matched, there shouldn't be a problem. 'Power of 2' sizes work well...16, 32, 64 for bucket size and at least the perpendicular to 'bucket order' size should also be power of two...256, 512, 1024, 2048,,,,also, when evenly matched there may be a slight increase in render speed (I've never tested or seen it...but I haven't looked for it, either).
lol...I did get that. Sorry if I explained myself badly my brain tends to be fried after working all day. I find that interesting I knew that was important for games that images were power of two...just didn't know it applied to DS also.
3Delight isn't 'strictly' stuck with power of two images and such (although, it seems to be more efficient that way), but it's easier to work out what the various sizes should be if that's what you use...
I don't know if this suggestion is possible, but how about a "twist" tool in the style section? Something that would twist sections of hair in a circular motion, to create spiral curls. If varying degrees of twist are added, one can create a braid effect with really tight twists, or even a dreaded hair look......just a thought.
Thanks, rendering yesterday my set 150.000 hair with shadow lmaps and 1 spot 500x650 small render
also the brushes don;t hang on me and styling is very smooth
I updated to last Nvidia beta driver it may be the reason also and win8 both improved the work with the plugin so much
I just tried to kill it yesterday and did not succeed
btw 1 question will be there other option to save the hair curves other than a scene ?
I tried to save it as figure/prop it did loaded back, I could edit and style again but failed to generate clean and render the curves it was just blank .
futurebiscuit - 14 November 2012 09:52 PM
Mec4D - 14 November 2012 09:45 PM
I love the Beat 6 release , so smooth without any issues or crash , render fast 150K hair in 5 sec with shadow maps
also used the disk cache !! great
and my favorite tool allow me to work freely and style without any drag , I am already on win8 and so far did not noticed any major issues
I will check out tomorrow the readme and make the tests you ask for to focus on
Welcome back... Hope you have recovered from the weather releated issues.
5 seconds? what are you rendering?
I was thinking about that yesterday I wish I had a twist brush as I use in Zbrush , life would be much easy while styling
StevieC - 15 November 2012 06:28 AM
I don't know if this suggestion is possible, but how about a "twist" tool in the style section? Something that would twist sections of hair in a circular motion, to create spiral curls. If varying degrees of twist are added, one can create a braid effect with really tight twists, or even a dreaded hair look......just a thought.
First decent render experimenting with the notion of movement and motion in hair. For the first time EVER, I can finally create the feeling of motion and movement in 3D hair! Experiencing a black out here, must conserve my laptop's battery, but more shots of this in the near future.....
