WHY does dForce hair render - somehow - despite dForce NOT working (gCard not able)

manekiNeko

post moved from PA freebies thank thread

this is funny... as in weird, not as in hahaha. i can't use dForce, ergo dForce hair not either. i reckon a while ago, i even tried some item that was rendered as bald or sth.

anyways, i downloaded this awesome freebie fox tail "just in case" - at some point, i might be lucky enough to actually possess a dForce-enabled pc/gcard.. and i used g8M +the tail, simplest scene. DS didn't crash. it didn't either render, as i expected, the tail bald-ish i.e. some curved bland rod or sth. the render didn't show (transparent page), used a lot of time where nothing was visible, but didn't stop either by itself, however it was not frozen. after a while i decided well it's not gonna work, so i cancelled the render, and as it sometimes does, the interrupted scene became visible (no idea why, but it happens). and guess what: MY FOX TAIL WAS VISIBLE. with hair!

can someone explain to me what the hell happened? i could have sworn that dForce hair is created during the render, but only WHEN you actually can use dForce... so in my case, NOT.

what am i supposed to do? wait with a blank page until the renderer fries my gcard (this is what i'm afraid of hence i didn't try again)? consider the whole thing as not working? because if it actually DOES work by some miracle, and it takes an ginormous amount of time just with G8M out of the box and 1 tail, i can't wrap my mind around how much time it would need for a full scene AND 1 tail...

AlmightyQUEST

You don't need to use dforce to render strand based hair. Strand based hair can be created/added by anyone, PAs can convert that to dforcable hair. Dforce changes the hair shape/movement, but it's not needed to see the hair. The hair will not show until you render it though, that's correct.

All that said, that doesn't mean your graphics card can handle rendering a given scene. However for me personally, rendering stand based hair has been even faster than some fiber hair renders. Also if the hair wasn't rendering, I would assume you hadn't downloaded the strand based hair files which include the shaders to render it, and possibly other files. If it did render in some cases and not others, I think some information about the scenes is needed to get an idea of what is going on.

manekiNeko

AlmightyQUEST said:

You don't need to use dforce to render strand based hair. Strand based hair can be created/added by anyone, PAs can convert that to dforcable hair. Dforce changes the hair shape/movement, but it's not needed to see the hair. The hair will not show until you render it though, that's correct.

 

All that said, that doesn't mean your graphics card can handle rendering a given scene. However for me personally, rendering stand based hair has been even faster than some fiber hair renders. Also if the hair wasn't rendering, I would assume you hadn't downloaded the strand based hair files which include the shaders to render it, and possibly other files. If it did render in some cases and not others, I think some information about the scenes is needed to get an idea of what is going on.

aaand... first, i realize that i always thought fibermesh hair and strand based hair are the same thing, i just guessed it was just another name every time i read about it/them. which it obviously isn't, according to your post. so then i suppose that lamh hair is strand based - generated by the computer where the user plnted a follicle or sth, right? and also this fox hair, no idea how it was made. and fibermesh.. is just a tiny mesh, like probably a very thin cylinder, visible in a scene like any other mesh.

and ofc i mixed up the dforce component into the whole thing - true, i can see a dforce cloth too, and render it, it just looks more or less wonky without simulation, depending on how the PA created the object (like, poncho looking like a frisbee...).

i have to go over the books and sort out the pieces of puzzle then. strand, fibermesh, and dforce hair. i obviously have no idea. and then yeah, maybe check what pc setup is necessary for what, my laptop is old, about 7 years at least, and my nvidia too. lamh crashes a lot, and heavy scenes freeze, so hair generation might be an issue.

thanks for orienting me ^^

AlmightyQUEST

LAMH is a different thing entirely, unless you export the LAMH to fiberhair. Fiberhair is, (I think?) a somewhat generic term for a way to model hair that models the mesh instead of the ribbons with transparency maps like many/most Poser/DAZ hairs are made with. Other modelling tool refer to "fibermesh" as well I believe, so well before DAZ introduced their new hair, you could find hairs in the store described as Fibermesh (Neftis3D makes a lot of these, and many eyebrows in the past few years are made this way). The higher poly count in fibermesh hair means it can be memory heavy.

DAZ Studio introduced "strand based hair" within the Studio program itself. So, unrelated to both fibermesh hairs and LAMH. Unhelpfully, strand based hair can be made dforce by vendors, so sometimes people just refer to that as "dforce hair". But before strand based hair was released, some people like Linday created hair that uses the cloth dforce capabilities, and also called that dforce hair. So it IS confusing, and makes sense to ask about it here! :D

manekiNeko

AlmightyQUEST said:

LAMH is a different thing entirely, unless you export the LAMH to fiberhair. Fiberhair is, (I think?) a somewhat generic term for a way to model hair that models the mesh instead of the ribbons with transparency maps like many/most Poser/DAZ hairs are made with. Other modelling tool refer to "fibermesh" as well I believe, so well before DAZ introduced their new hair, you could find hairs in the store described as Fibermesh (Neftis3D makes a lot of these, and many eyebrows in the past few years are made this way). The higher poly count in fibermesh hair means it can be memory heavy.

DAZ Studio introduced "strand based hair" within the Studio program itself. So, unrelated to both fibermesh hairs and LAMH. Unhelpfully, strand based hair can be made dforce by vendors, so sometimes people just refer to that as "dforce hair". But before strand based hair was released, some people like Linday created hair that uses the cloth dforce capabilities, and also called that dforce hair. So it IS confusing, and makes sense to ask about it here! :D

confusing? where? ​  ... yeah. i really WILL have to do my homework on this one. because right now, all of this just sounds like some incomprehensible, long forgotten ancient language to me. i can't even... anyways, thanks a lot for explaining as best as you could, and for pointing me in the right direction. i might err a bit from there, lost and scared, but i hope at the end i'll see the light :D

manekiNeko

well.. again thx for your input! i didn't even KNOW DS had this new feature strand based hair integrated in 4.11! i totally missed that one. so after discovering tutos on YT, i just planted one fat tuft of hair on top of g8m, played a tiny bit with the styling tools - that's gonna need a LOT of learning lol - and rendered...

as you said, the rendering of that kinda hair is performance-tied, i needed a few minutes just for this tuft - no wonder my laptop almost died of severe fatigue trying to render a full hairy tail. which means.. interesting new tool, interesting new technique (for PA products i could buy)... but with this laptop i can pretty much forget about it, just as i can forget about dForce, because my cpu can't manage the first, and my gCard can't handle the latter. yay :/ . ah well at least i can do iray. ~ and i can still explore the range of success/crashing when using old lamh presets or the newer catalyser ones on the few animals i bought *shrug*
i hope santa drops a new computer off the sledge by accident while rummaging in the gift bag. one can hope for a wonder innit ^^