Digital Art Zone

Spyro - 21 January 2013 10:05 PM

mjc1016 - 21 January 2013 02:19 PM

With the squished dome, are you using the inside faces or the outside faces? (In max, the dome is made of a sphere primitive, which from memory is not solid. )

And cheers for the confirmation on what you were doing with sub D. It was to do with the verts for curves (Before imported to Daz. Got ya )

Outside faces...

Basically it was to take a flat plane and divide the snot out of it, then vary the edges...but it seems that, and I'm not sure which is doing it, but something odd happens with more than eight sides...no matter what it comes out as if the area were being calculated as if it were a circle. 4 through 6 sides seems to be calculated as if it were a square and 8 comes out close to the area of an octagon. Also it was to make the surface itself 'crumpled'...by doing this, it's like wadding up a piece of paper. The surface area is still the same, but you can now fit it into a smaller volume. But it isn't as effective as it could be, because of that square or circle method of calculating the area...instead of trying to calculate the 'correct' number of sides.

Then as long as the item is mostly like what it seems to be, a 3d item's area pretty much follows cube/sphere calculations...and it still works that way even if you make more than one material zone for it. So a cube is going to have more hairs than a plane...a sphere/dome more than a circle (spheres are easiest to work with). There is a point, though, that it seems to flip back to a 'flat' object.

With my dome, I comb all the hairs to point the same direction. For smaller items (under about 6 cm diameter) the sphere seems to be the densest.

I think I finally figured out how I ran into trouble with my tribble...I started with a sphere, that originally was pretty large, squashed it some and then used the scaling script to scale it, but didn't 'lock' the scale transform by exporting/importing the scaled item...so when I saved it, the hair was actually using the area of the 'large' version.

(eta:I KNOW I fixed that bloody quote tag...at least once, already)

Thats interesting, I see you've really thought this out I'll toy with spheres rather than the ends of cylinders next time around. I've revised a ponytail hairstyle I did previously, this time with lower head hair count (For practicalities) and increased the ponytail hair 'count from 400-480 with 3 nodes' to '1 node 1000 count'... The test renders of the ponytail show vast improvement. I'm rendering the portrait and will also do a side on view as well.

Cheers Man. I look forward to seeing/hearing your future results/discoveries

Revised Ponytail style.

Portrait: Render time: 53 mins, 5 nodes total. Left bang, Right Bang, Full head hair (200 hair count), Ponytail (1000 Hair Count) and Eyebrows. This rendered rather fast.

Side View: Render Time: 2 hrs 11 mins Same nodes... Attempted to reduce render time by removing all hair at the crown and leaving the outer edges in which deceivingly covers up the missing hair (about 60-70% of hair was removed). Unfortunately that didnt work as expected, Render time cut down a little, but not by much at all.

Side view is the full rendered size. Portrait is scaled down.

impresive spyro well donexx

That pony tail is looking awesome. I must try one soon!

Here is a short thick mess and a GH furred bikini top

Wow! Very nice work!

Spyro - 22 January 2013 09:30 AM

Revised Ponytail style.

Portrait: Render time: 53 mins, 5 nodes total. Left bang, Right Bang, Full head hair (200 hair count), Ponytail (1000 Hair Count) and Eyebrows. This rendered rather fast.

Side View: Render Time: 2 hrs 11 mins Same nodes... Attempted to reduce render time by removing all hair at the crown and leaving the outer edges in which deceivingly covers up the missing hair (about 60-70% of hair was removed). Unfortunately that didnt work as expected, Render time cut down a little, but not by much at all.

Side view is the full rendered size. Portrait is scaled down.

Not a ponytail, just long hair draped over the shoulder.

I made this hair a few weeks ago, but decided to tweak it with the root angle tools.

One node - for my sins.

Thanks very much guys!

@ Mangee - Nice work man I picture her on the cat walk

@Gone - Only use the amount of nodes it needs to create the look your after. I use a scull cap node for short hairstyles to help prevent the balding affect. Long hair, the only reason I used multiple nodes was for ease of control when posing, and to not have to struggle with auto parting (Which I just cant get to work in many cases). Looks great man! How long did it take to render out of curiosity? I couldn't get the side view of the ponytail below the 2 + hours, and wonder how well 'long loose hair' takes Also you might know... When extruding hair curves heaps, does it require resampling of the curves? I dont really understand what resampling is for

That's why I said "for my sins".

If I had 2 nodes, then I could restyle the long hair quickly and easily without disturbing the top. As it is, I have to be careful about how I comb so I don't make a mess of the top hair. But, then, the whole point of this particular hair was to see how easy it would be to work with just one node.

This is one of the hairs I did where the outer edge of the paint map is white but most of the map is painted at 60%. This let me set the distribution amount to 350 to get a tight hair line but still generate only about 120,000 hairs. Playing with the root angle tools goes a long way to filling in bald spots.

As I understand it, when you lengthen the hair, additional verts are automatically created with the specified length - the default is 1 (used to be 0.5). If you change the resample to a smaller amount you will get smoother curves and more verts. Increase the sample size to reduce vert count but get more angular curves. Ultimately, the style you create and your needs will determine if you need to resample. The hair length is only one factor to consider if you want to resample or not.

The only time I've resampled is with eyebrows. I set the sample rate to 0.2 so I can get better curves because the hair is too short for the default sample rate to look good. At least that's my opinion - YMMV. With long, smooth hair, you can probably increase the sample size to reduce the vert count without having much impact on the quality.

Most of the images I've poseted lately have been using the Julie AOIBL light set. This has UE2 light so takes a longer time to render. Most of my renders are in the 1.5 hour range. This one was 3 hours. With just the default lighting, it renders in about 10 minutes.

So, there's my sad story.

It's not a sad story man, cheers for the info. At least my render time for the long hair is pretty average. I wasn't sure If I did something which extended the render time, all my short hair portraits have averaged 20-25 mins, the back/side views vary 30-40 mins at a 1500x1500 size render. Same lighting.

If the ponytail is part of the same head hair node, render time doubles more or less, if its separate it seems to render substantially faster. (May have something to do with such a high hair count all crammed together. The back of the head hair node when the ponytail is separate node still takes a long time to render.

I think perhaps some of my render time would be somewhat influenced by the Uber Environment light that's rather bright in the light set I'm using.

I really must start getting in on all this,

Right now, I'm still familiarising myself with lights and shaders (It's been a LONG time since I had DS.), but I do fully intend to do something with Garibaldi Hair in due course. I can see that I will no doubt be bugging the heck out of you guys, so get ready LOL!

Spyro, you really seem to have got the hang of this so I'll more than likely be approaching you a lot. The main project I want to do with this is King Kong, I have everything else I need but want to do more fur on him.

Keep up the good work guys and I will join the party at some point

CHEERS!

Well, there goes that theory.

I had thought that fewer verts would make for a faster render - but not so.

As I mentioned with the previous image, I had made the hair a few weeks ago so the default resample/interpolate settings were 0.5. Just over 120,000 hairs were generated with 5.5 million verts. As mentioned, it took just over 3 hours to render.

With this one, everything is set up the same but I changed the resample/interpolate to 2. Same hair count but only 2 million verts. Render time was 5 hours!

Hair still looks decent but you can clearly see the effect of the resample.

Gone I far prefer the first one as it seems to sit on her head better.

Inspired by all of these ponytails I had a quick go at one myself last night.

I used a fur shader on my hairtie to help make the join work and looking at it now I think the tail should have been fuller... but all in all an encouraging exercise and I now at least have a useable little hair tie prop for helping with my GH ponytails.

For my tail I used a resized armband from some clothing set and parented a squashed sphere inside it that the ponytail hair is growing on. The hardest part by far was brushing the main hair and organising a join point that looked credible and I do think the fur shader on the hair tie has helped a bit with hiding how messy the join really is.

The fur shader was a good idea.

Well done Mangee! What was your render time for this? Did you find it at all longer time than your loose hair of similar length? Works well with the fury hairtie Like the combing too!

@ Gone - Its a very strange territory trying to reduce render time. All obvious methods just don't seem to work.