Best Red Hair
Trex
Posts: 37
in The Commons
Hi all
I've found that finding a really realistic looking red hair texture can be difficult.
What's everyone's favorite red hair model/texture available?
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Comments
Realistic in which way? The color and structure can vary a lot from person to person. OOT's (outoftouch) hairs are generally very realistic though, and he's also made some Iray textures that can be used on almost all newer hairs. It includes several red colors plus an option for fine tuning the shades.
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/oot-iraypair-hair-shaders-for-daz-studio-iray/110302/
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/oot-iraypair-hair-shader-xpansion-for-daz-studio-iray/110767/
Here's a sample applied to a randomly chosen hair (Blithe):
Do you mean natural red head? Some "red heads" are not natural but dyed. Dyed or natural, red hair variates with the individual and that individual's age.
Agree with Taoz, that hair shader set is awesome.
Thirded. I use it on almost every hair, except some later hairs that have good Iray shaders included. It's particularly useful for old hair models as they can be quite good mesh-wise (although may need converting to subd) but fall down on the textures and shaders.
I did this recently with an Genesis hair called Mavka, which I could never get to look good before.
A lot of red hair here is more auburn than red. It is tough to get a reddish color which is lighter or that match the skin tone and eyebrows. If the brows are super dark it look like dye or henna to me.
I love the OOT shader and use it all the time. I also love the shader set by SloshWerks and DraagonStorm
https://www.daz3d.com/uht2-ultimate-color
Those look really good.
...I use Slosh's UHT2 shader kit for when I can't find a good ginger-red. Unfortunately it only works for Iray so when working in 3DL I'm pretty much stuck with whatever colour/texture is available with the particular hair content.
Here's some UHT2 samples:
Yeah. real Ginger hair versus the dark red/auburn... that's harder.
Sometimes/oftentimes, it's better to start with Platinum or a light Blonde, and then add orange-red to the Diffuse and/or Translucency maps in order to arrive at Ginger.
...9 year old Leela using UHT2.
BTW, there is an addon to UHT2, not mentioned on the product page for some reason. I have it and probably have used some textures from it here (they end up in the same folders as those from the main set).
https://www.daz3d.com/uht2-fantasy-colors
Have you tried to swap UHT textures into a hair that has 3DL shaders?
OOT has great textures. I usually change the surfaces a bit.
...yep, but it converts to Iray surface parameters some which don't work with 3DL shader channels which means having to convert back, and some hair (like those by April YSH) have multiple layers to deal with so it means multiple conversions. Wish it worked in both engines like Skin Builder Pro does.
Yes, based on this thread and another thread about hair currently in FastGrab where they are using OOT hair shaders that is a product worth buying and I will.
Just changing the texture in the surface settings shouldn't change the whole thing over to Iray. Bring up your hair, apply any 3DL shader to you want first if needed, and then go to the surfaces of the hair and manually swap the diffuse texture with your favorite UHT textures. This will change only the texture and not change any settings at all. Most hairs use the same texture over and over, so you can highlight multiple surfaces and change them all at once.
...it's a different world going rom Iray to 3DL than it is from 3DL to Iray
Some experiments - used the white har from Sveva's Kandy set and turned it red.
PhilW has a set of Iray hair shaders with several shades of red. Apply to any hair on any character.
https://www.daz3d.com/hair-lustre-shaders-for-iray
...however when I used UHT2 again all the parameters in the surface tab were changed to Iray ones indicating that now the hair was set up for Iray and not 3DL. I've used it before on older hair when I was still rendering in Iray and yeah, it works fine then.
Thank you very much for everyone's suggestions.
I've been through most of the recommendations here and had the most success with the OOt package Taoz suggested. It really is some realstic, natural looking red air.
That does look good. Is it as good for other colors?
...oops, wrong thread. Got mixed up with the red hair character thread.
On the whole, I'd definitley recommend the pack.
I'm not sure if the changes to Iray from 4.8-4.9-4.10 effected how well the settings work or not, but the OoT black color is very odd looking. But yes, if you adjust the surfaces a bit it will look much better. The key settings to look at are the translucency options. They make the hair look too gray or even white in certain light. I usually just turn the trans weight off for black hair.
Do NOT apply UHT2 at all. What I am talking about doing is going into the surface tab for the hair and replacing the textures manually with the UHT2 textures you wish to use. If you have a 3DL shader you really like, but it just doesn't have your favorite color, apply it first. Then go to the surfaces and replace the textures with UHT textures. You'll need to navigate to them through your runtime folders. You are not applying the shader, only swapping textures. If you do it this way, the 3DL settings are preserved.
If you like the result, you can then save this as a shader preset for future use so you don't have to go through this process again.
Well I bought this OOT iRay Material over at Rendo 2 days ago & I am disappointed. I am using DAZ Stdio 4.10.0.123 and everything from platinum blonde to reds to browns is turning out much much darker than they should as everything is rendering a muddy brown hair, even the lightest blonde.
And now, even the other hair materials I've applied to the hair I've change to try & get the original colors back in not working even after deleting the hair and loading it anew from the original preset. That's the Nick Hair which is also by OOT.
And I've restarted DAZ Studio twice. This is a bug that makes no sense - it's like it's change some hidden shader code somewhere! Which, now that I think of it might be possible and what's happened. I am going to have to open an few old scenes and create a new scene to see if I can get the Nick Hair colors rendering correctly again. Also try other hairs too.
Very unexpected.