Why do we need to convert to particle hair?

samla

Hi, forgive my ignorance, but I can't find an explanation on why we need to convert from the polygonal hair imported by Diffeomorphic to Blender's particle hair system. Is it for improved appearances, animation? When I render the imported DAZ model in cycles, the hair looks fairly similar already prior to conversion. But since there's obviously a benefit to converting the hair, I would like to know. Thanks.

Ninefold

You don't "need" to. Some people may prefer to work with particle hair -- including for reasons related to animation, since particle hair is simulatable -- but if you don't, there's no reason to.

Padone

In general you don't need to convert, I mean it's an option it's not mandatory. The advantages of particle/curve hair is they're much faster to render and take little resources compared to complex polygonal hair, also particle/curve hair get special hair shaders which aim to be photoreal. The disadvantage is that polygonal hair is easier to pose/animate, at least until the blender team improves the hair simulation.

jwcjaygaines

It's purely optional. I personally convert all my models' hair (scalp, body, pubic, etc) to particles to save file space. Some of the polygonal hair, especially on the head, makes the file size balloon, because all facial morphs/shape keys you import should also be applied to the scalp or facial hair so everything moves naturally. If you just convert it to particles, you don't have to worry about transferring morphs, and it really saves space. I have cut a 700K file down to just 12K doing this. If you don't want your new particle hairs to be affected by simulations or force fields, you can go under the particle settings for each group and turn it off: Particle Properties -> Field Weights -> All -> 0