Strand-Based hair won't render
baalhug
Posts: 21
Hi guys:
I have created a Strand-Based hair for my character. It was working fine, but at some point it stopped rendering. I think it was when I double click on a hair material with the strand-based hair selected. The lines of the hair are there, and I still can see the hair in the strand-based hair editor of Edit->Object menu, when I enable "Show hairs" on "Style" tab, for example.
Whenever I turn on "Preview PR Hairs" or just render the image, no hair is shown, I can only see the curves with "Preview PR Hairs" off.
I don't fully understand DAZ materials system "Surfaces"... that is a chaotic part of the application, without an "object" which represents the material, plus you don't know easily how many materials are applied. I come from Blender, not great, but much better than this on Textures/Materials managing. Anyway, I have "double clicked" on Iray Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shader with the strand-based hair selected but it didn't help.
I have been reading every post around with problems similar to this, but I found nothing exactly like this, and I have tried the solutions for other similar problems without any success.
If you need screenshots or scenes, just let me know, but the problem is just that: The lines are there, the hair follows the head, it is parented and it's "Fit to" the figure, so... I don't know what's going on.
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Comments
I am in doubt, when you say render, if you mean preview render or and actual render.
It sounds to me as you mean preview render. And if that is the case you might have to increase tesselation for preview in the parameter tab to more than 1.
Do it with the surface selected in Surfaces tab
I mean render the scene. In the preview I can only see the curves, when I enable Parameters -> Line Tessellation -> Preview PR Hairs it won't show the hair either.
I have tried that with no results.
I have added a new Strand-Based Mohawk Male (2) and it works good. I have copied the surfaces of this hair to the first one but the problem is still happening.
I'm uploading some screenshots. You can see the hair with "Preview PR Hairs" enabled and disabled, the render view and the Strand-Based Hair Editor. Remember there are two Strand-Based Mohawk Male objects, the one visible is the second one I used for comparison.
Well, I'm gonna remake the hair. It was 2 hours of work, but much less than the 1-2 hours of "moderation" each time I post a comment and another 1-2 hours for each of your answers. I just hope this won't happen again and if someone knows the problem and the solution I hope it helps others in the future. Thank you for your time anyway.
Ok, I found the problem and the solution.
This was happening because the hair was parented to the figure. No matter if you parent it with the head or the main bone. The thing is this object Transforms (basically location and rotation) should be 0 because they don't move in relation with its parent. When you move the parent, it should also move their children with it, like an arm or a hand, but the fact is these children (arms, legs...) don't have transform with their own, while strand-based hair has. So you will see how hair transforms change (position and rotation) when you move/rotate its parent. Now this object has a "Fit to" property, so the hair curves will still follow the head no matter what. But the actual hair will be displaced and rendered away. The problem was not the hair wasn't rendered. The problem was: after a lot of translations of the body, the hair transforms had been moved a lot, and it was rendered far away.
So the solution is pretty simple: unparent the hair and set its transforms to 0.
Now it will be rendered nicely and the "Fit to" property (must be targetting the character) will take care of following the body.