Particle hair?

FrauBlucher

I would like to learn to make my own realistic hairstyles. I've been playing around with particle hair and just realized it does not export well to other programs, but needs to somehow be converted. I have followed various tutorials on the subject, but none have sucessfully made the hairstyle work in Daz. 

Does anyone use blender particle hair as a base for Daz hairstyles? If so, do you have suggestions or a link to a tutorial that would help me along the process? It occurs to me that maybe particle hair is not the best approach. I've looked up so many tutorials at this point it's all a blur. If there is a specific tutorial on realistic hair (non particle) that you like I would love to see it.

Thanks in advance for your help!

TheMysteryIsThePoint

I think particle hair actually is the best Blender solution out there. The problem is that Blender's particle hair is not particularly good, and they've been threatening to overhaul and modernize it for a couple of years now.

I've found that a useful technique is to use DS hair as a starting point for further editing in Blender. Sagan supports converting a few kinds of tube based hair, and I'm working on adding a few more, Cinus wrote a cool converter, and I think Diffeomorphic supports hair conversion to some degree as well.

Use them as a starting point, and modify them by turning on "Show Children" in particle edit mode, and make very small incremental changes with proportinal editing, while viewing your work from all directions. A seismic discovery for me was that you can choose vertex mode, select a single vertex and then ctrl-L to select the entire strand, and the editing will apply to ONLY the selected strand(s). It takes forever, but you have very precise control.

I think hair sim in Blender is currently a lost cause though.

FrauBlucher

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

I think particle hair actually is the best Blender solution out there. The problem is that Blender's particle hair is not particularly good, and they've been threatening to overhaul and modernize it for a couple of years now.

I've found that a useful technique is to use DS hair as a starting point for further editing in Blender. Sagan supports converting a few kinds of tube based hair, and I'm working on adding a few more, Cinus wrote a cool converter, and I think Diffeomorphic supports hair conversion to some degree as well.

Use them as a starting point, and modify them by turning on "Show Children" in particle edit mode, and make very small incremental changes with proportinal editing, while viewing your work from all directions. A seismic discovery for me was that you can choose vertex mode, select a single vertex and then ctrl-L to select the entire strand, and the editing will apply to ONLY the selected strand(s). It takes forever, but you have very precise control.

I think hair sim in Blender is currently a lost cause though.

 I'm pretty new to this and have not heard of Sagan before. I will take a look at it. I will look into Diffeomorphic also. 

I will definately try your suggestion on morphing single strands on DS hair. I'm sure its labor intensive, but worth it for certain hairstyles. 

Just in the last few days I've started playing around with strand-based hair creator in Daz. I'm not sure it will work for what I have in mind, still exploring what it can do.

Thank you for your help!