dear Hairmakers..
Ruphuss
Posts: 2,631
in The Commons
pls can you make black hair look shiny black not grey in light
is this so hard to do right ?
no i do not know one hair product that does this right
and yes i know how to change this in the surface tab
but when buying a product it should work like this out of the box
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Short answer: Yes, it's very difficult, because you have no idea what lighting set up your customers will be using. (And, frankly, many people's lighting skills are disastrous... a group I'm not excluding myself from).
It's the same with skin materials; a differently lit scene will result in a very different final result.
As Matt said, I think it depends on the lights although there are hair pieces that indeed look more gray than others.
What I would recommend is to get some hair shaders.
I have this one https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-hair-shaders-for-iray and was very happy with the results.
The other one from colorwerks: https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-extreme-hair-texture-blending-for-iray-and-dforce-hair also looks good and I plan to buy it when it's at a good discount.
so pls recommend a hair thats not like this
its not a matter of lighting
its a matter of the surface settings dialed wrong
So what are the right settings, and do they work if you use other lighting approaches (not that you say how you are lighting now)?
I use Backlight Hair Shaders on practically every hair that I own now. Not because the original shaders are bad (I've had a bit of trouble with pale hair getting washed out under bright lights, but never dark hair like the OP, so can't say what the solution to that would be) but because they react so nicely to different lights and are easy to adjust to different lighting setups.
Are you working with Iray or 3Delight? Maybe a screenshot with an example of what you're seeing and the settings and lights would help us see what you mean?
In my mind, there's something wrong with spending upwards of $20.00 US for a hair product and then finding out that you need to spend more money on a hair shader to make it look right. Not trying to be offensive here, just saying...
Well, first, you only have to buy the shader once, whichever one you like, and can use it on every other hair.
And second, 'look right' is an opinion. So it's a personal decision.
you don;t need to, it's choice. I tweak nearly every product i use in DS to get them to look how i want, again, choice. Just because a PA has different tastes than mine is no reason to hold it against them.
Hey, you get your real hair for free and then have to spend a pile of money on it to keep it looking nice, even if all you do is shave it off. :)
But seriously, buying those extra shaders gets you a lot more than just fixing that one situation. You get a huge range of color options, can change the gloss levels, add tints, etc., plus,and I think this is the bigigie as far as I'm concerned, you can match fiber hair colors to the transmapped and dforce hair so your characters look like they have their real hair and NOT funky dye jobs, without messing around in photoshop. 'Cause, you know, no matter how Daenaerys Targaryen may look in Game of Thrones, real blondes and redheads aren't born with black eyebrows. ;/
Yes, buying the hair shaders was by far the best investement I did in Daz hair wise.
Some hairs have the right colour from the start, but just having the option and it's already great.
Plus having all the masks and overlay options for combining hair colors and as you guys mentioned different levels of shine.
You can't beat that.
Also, if you buy a general hair shader, you don't have to buy individual hair shaders for different types of hairs, so you still save money in the end.
Now if only someone would do a retrofit and turn loose a hair shader pack for 3DL...
talking bout iray and a default dome and scene render scene here
thats what a hair creator can foresee
nothing special
and that should work out of the box
Hope is not a plan.
I'm sorry, but it is down to lighting to a huge extend. Which render engine are you using? Are you using Iray or 3Delight hair? No, I'm not going to presume you're using the correct shader with the correct render engine. Iray will try and convert, but it may not get it right.
Some shaders may be easier than others, I'll grant you.
Please give a few examples of hair that look grey to you, and we can try and reproduce your look (if we own it) and we're not experiencing the same issue.
Psssst, my Hana character has hair shaders for Iray AND 3Delight ;) https://www.daz3d.com/hana-for-kanade-8 and the 3delight has two versions- AoA surface and omHumanSurface Shader... it takes a lot longer to set up and render and do all the 3delight.
As for Iray, I have a couple of shaders I use a lot- Hinky's hair salon is great to render fast (for example OOT hair i love but renders SO slow, i get great results with hinky's hair and renders faster and softer) and like listed above, I like backlight shaders.
A set of hair tha I highly recommend with good settings are the windfeld hair sets, they are very good.
And I'm slowly getting into dhair- I use chevybabe's latest hair (and i'm so glad it's got morphs so you don't have to actually drape it) and i find that for dhair its nice to have actual dhair shaders.
I think hair is often set up for the default light, which isnt' very bright from the front so hair spec is turned up. SO much depends on the type of light and the render settings.
Instead of thinking about making hair look right, perhaps figure out the lighting better. I do like to use shaders most often though just so all the figures in the scene have matching hair settings even tho in real life its also variable hair types. :)
There ARE some hair shader packs for 3DL... Mec4D's Unshaven 2 includes a bunch, for example, and despite the name, Destiny Garden's Toon hair set has an array of natural colors. Then there's the Fairy Hair Pack and Omnifreakers Hair shaders for UberEnvironment... and I'm not sure how to classify Draagonstorm's Infinite Variety for Hair since it's bascally for adding streaks and highlights. Elsewhere, it looks like the older versions of Out OfTouch's shaders are gone, but there's a free pack of 3DL hair shaders here - http://www.sharecg.com/v/75399/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/Mostly-Universal-Hair-Shader-Bright-Colors
It seems to me like there used to be a few more, but I can't see any PAs spending a lot of time to make a new set at this point.
The default dome/ render settings have way too much color, reflect and brightness to design any material/ shader around.
^what Chevybabe said.... the default lights are really not good for portraits!!
Do you think the default hdr (ruins) should seriously be a different one? The more I use it, the more I feel it's not up to scratch as the default hdr. Maybe a studio hdr with 5600k would be far better.
I somehow forgot there were 3DL hair shaders included with Hana! Thanks for the reminder (and for including them
), those will be very useful.
I hadn't remembered that Hana included hair shaders as well as 3DL skin settings. I'll be making use of that. Thank you for the reminder.
I do have Mec4D's unshaven, and both the others. I've used them, too. They are a help, but nowhere near as comprehensive as the shader packages that have been released for Iray. I rather suspect that 3DL just doesn't offer the range of possibility that Iray does. And, these days anyone using 3DL is making a consious decision to do so rather than just accepting it as how things are done.
I suspect that I really need to sit down and experiment on using things like the Unshaven colors on other fiber hairs. I should think they *ought* to transfer withoiut a big hassle. I know I've used the colrs from Unshaven 2 (which is 3DL) on the Unshaven 3 set (which I think is Iray) without a problem. Trying to kitbash transmapped hair is more of an issue.
It depends on what you render most often. Lets not forget that the primary purpose of DAZ Studio is, and always has been, renders of Naked Vickies with Swords in Temples, and the Ruins HDR is a great choice for that. )
Shaders & Lighting? Really? I wish that was the only problem with hair. At least that can be fixed with just adjusting the surface settings. Tried using Galene Hair for G3F and ended up with the nonsense in the image attached below. No amount of smoothing & collision iterations would correct it. So I either have to dick around with two different sets of hair and hope I can find a scalp that would work with it(unlikely), or just use completely different hair that doesn't exhibit the scalp issue.
Have you tried scaling the scalp a bit so it doesn't intersect with the forehead?
Since you're referincing collisions and smootihing, have you tried just parenting the hair and manually fitting instead of using autofit? In my experience that often works much better. Otherwise, for the garbage on the forehead, I'd suggest either the geometry tool and hiding those polys on the hair, or hiding the same thing by using photoshop/Gimp to black out the offending areas on the opacity map section in textures. In either case, the problem is still technically there but it doesn't matter as it's invisible in the render.
The forehead stuff can be dealt with using that, but that white spot seems to be something with the cutout opacity for the scalp.
Increase the surface glossy roughness on all the surfaces of the hair in question I think and that will decrease shininess and that grey look you are getting for many hairs. For some V4/M4 and similarly old hairs you'll need to change the 'Base Color' to try & salvage the included hair materials because for 3DL the glossiness used to be almost always 100% painted in and there isn't much you can do outside making lots of adjustments to the surfaces settings or use the hair material surfaces material of other hair your like and copy paste to your hair you're using.
It does look odd to see a hair look like it's in bright light yet the rest of the figure and scene is not nearly so bright.
Here are 3 Iray renders under the same lighting (Pro-Studio HDR Lighting System. I tried every preset and just settled on light 03L). No postwork, camera headlight off. No changes to render settings other than what light 03L changed (Environment Lighting Resolution 2048, Dome Rotation 270), and dome-only lighting.
I used Blair Hair, Fashion Bob Hair, and Bella Mane Hair. To be fair, Blair Hair and Fashion Bob Hair were the closest to their promo/thumbnail images, so no surprises there, and Fashion Bob was the closest to pure black. Bella Mane Hair was a surprise, as I wasn't expecting thick white streaks in the black hair (no promos with black hair so didn't know what to expect).
I'm leaning towards the OP in that it would be nice to get a pure black hair option. Again, to be fair, I didn't look through every hair product.