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So I went to study a number of brand new dForce SBH promos in the DAZ store to see how they behave under various lighting conditions etc. They are of course all IRay renders, and to me it looks like they suffer from exactly the same lack of uv along the hair length, I can't see any convincing hair specular highlights or even reflections, it just looks like diffuse color and translucency to me. Any users having an opinion on this matter? They certainly look more realistic in many ways but the shading is just not right for human hair.
It's a dilemma,really, as regular transmapped hair looks off for other reasons but it's easy to get the things I mentioned to look descent. To be honest I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere. I recall there being a SBH thread but...
I might be wrong about this, which is why I ask. Maybe the promos all were hastily made?
maybe post an example lol
Definitely not, just go check the ten most SBH dForce rescent hairs, that's what I did;)
To expand a bit on the matter, correct me if I'm wrong, but blonde hair should have strong translucency and weak reflectance (fresnel, if you will), while very dark hair would have the opposite, just saying...
Did you find the source code?
no
I recall seeing something downloadable once, how much I don't know, but of course no use to me so never did
Wendy, thanks for replying, it would be nice to have a way to import and export curves as other apps do. The source code could have helped us with that.
Garibaldi was not made open source.
I likely was mistaken
GB Express was given away for free for a good while, before DAZ bought it.
yeah but apparently not the code
I may have been confusing it with Reality and a few other programs that were
...so I'm gonna experiment with the IRay- shaded SBH a bit, before opening a ticket. However, still would have loved to get a couple of reasonable comments regarding the SBH shader and if the results are satisfying...
The SBH is a little confusing (specifically, what different parameters do), but once you sort it out you can get good, satisfying results.
And if you don't care about mapping across surface but instead by individual hair, you can use any other shader you like better. There are times I've swapped to Iray Uber just because I want to do something weird, like make the tips of the hairs glow or something.
What I like is the extremely low levels of GPU memory usage by using lines instead of geometry, the fast render times and the predictable results in fur or hair color.
So my "critique" could be due to complexity of the shader and difficulties in using it?
I agree with the memory usage and speed- part, which is why I really would like to sort this out!
It's difficult going from a setup you are long familiar with to something new.
Some tips I've gleaned about the Blended Dual Lobe Hair shader:
Transmission colors are what you'd expect... akin to translucency color.
Base color took me a long time to figure out.
What you should (IMO!) do is set Base Roughness to 1 and Glossy Layer Weight to somewhere between .5 to 1.
The behavior will be that base color is like regular base color, transmission color like translucency color, and Glossy Layer Weight will (weirdly) behave like inverse Translucency Weight. For hair, you really don't want to go below GLW .5, or it looks waxy/gummy.
Finally, Highlight is, in this approach, the true glossy/shine effect. But you want to use it sparingly: Highlight Weight between .02 and .05. Highlight Roughness is ideally .2 to .4 (depending on the softness of the look).
Anyway, I hope that steers folks well. And that's just one guy's opinion; some of this stuff I only tripped over quite recently.
Tks Will, very helpful!
Maybe confusing it with that render engine export thing. It wasn't octane I don't think, but it was a similar one. Oh reality I think it was called.
These are all my own SBH creation rendered in Iray in 2020:
It was a long time ago, but IIRC, I didn't use the default SBH shader at the time. I hear you about results using it leaving something to be desired. I realize this is more a wig than going for real hair (for me, it was a desire for backlighting effects). I do think it illustrates that the issues you describe aren't inherent to SBH or Iray, though, and may be more about the shader used.
- Greg
I got Garibaldi for free when it was given away by the person who created it and I got a license key. When I installed the Daz Studio version where SBH was impkemented, Garibaldi was uninstalled and it was impossible to reinstall it. The ebsite says this:
Garibaldi Express for DAZ Studio is no longer available. No more paid or free licenses will be issued. This website remains for archive purposes only.
It was possible to export Garibaldi hairs as obj file but this feature was removed in Daz's SBH.
Thanks for sharing these renders, I think they prove I was wrong about speculars, as I can definitely see some
! (It may be a coincidence, but the light/blonde ones look better to my eyes, while the black hair is kind of matte.) And nice tranclucency, so it obviously work well in either render engine.Still haven't had the time to look more into this, but these images told me a lot:))
So yes it looks like IRay has the upper hand to the 3Delight. PT shaders I have, and the regular REYES stuff works as expected.
See here;)
Thank you so much! :)
Hmm, just learned that SBH and dForceSBH have different uv-mapping. Could anyone explain how they differ? This might be significant, as I was referring to the free SBH, included in DS, and was under the impression both types shared the same uv-layouts.
UV this UV that
idgi
I was just playing around with dForce Hair, and another thing about it and 3dl... it often renders faster, and better, than many 3dl hairs (transmap bug rearing up).
Don't worry, you don't have to get it. You have a working RiCurves shader. Tks for the render! I can see faint highlights with obviously correct anisotropy direction. My next question would be: Do you get the same result with a self made SBH model, with the same shader? (And I still haven't seen a render of a shiny dark SBH with physically correct plausible highlight intensity.) Still don't get it?
Yup I hate transmapped hair. And part of that is because vendors love to use those greyshaded opacitymaps instead of proper on-off masks. I'm sure IRay would (equally?) benefit in terms of rendering speed.
that was one i made by myself with the SBH Editor.
im not versed in the minutia of correct anisotropy, fresnelI effect, and highlight itnensities, or whatever. Maybe all of that is important, idk.
Im really just focused on getting the style and hair strands down. Even with a basic plastic shader SBH hairs can look okay... better than some transmapped hairs thats for sure. In that render i was just using the SBH hair shader preset i linked to earlier, which is just based on Daz's iray dual lobe hair shader.
That said, I like the Hair BSDF shader in Blender much more, which apparently is the same one from Zootopia or something. Out of the box, it looks a lot better than the daz dual lobe. And renders fast.