Strand based hair
Hello everyone, I'm new to Daz Studio and been trying my hand at tinkering around in the built in strand based hair creator.
Is there anything besides blender or a very good tutorial on using blender to create hair? I know learing hair is probably a very long process to learn, I'm new to much of 3d charactor creation so hope that you all can bear with me.
It seems that the built in creator is incapable of parted flattened hair or I just can't figure out how to make it work. No matter what tools I use or process I try using, the very top of the character's head always has a whole bunch of hair that can't be combed down or moved at all. I can manage to mat everything down below that but never the very top.
It seems that the built in hair creator will work very well for basic straight upright hair, but for parted combed flat hair it seems that hair creator can't do it.
I'm hoping and confident that blender can do it and understand that blender has a very high learning curve, but I spent about a total of 20 hours trying different ways to make it work in Daz Studio and seemingly not getting anywhere with their hair creator.
Thanks!
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I came across this youtube video by PixelicaCG that uses the new blender hair tool it's pretty nice!
There is a tutorial on Daz Studio's Strand-based hair on my deviantart (here). I describe two different processes for creating parted hair in that tutorial.
One alternative approach I don't mention in the tutorial specifically about making parted hair is this: one of the main limitations of SBH Editor in Daz Studio is a lack of ability to create guide strands freely. Guide strands spawn automatically at vertices. So the only way to control where guide strands will spawn is to build this into the haircap/skullcap. So if you wanted to create a part in the hair, creating a dense set of edge loops on the haircap/skullcap where the part will be should give you enough guide strands in that area. Of course, this approach requires a priori knowledge about how you intend to style the hair and where the part will be.
In terms of creating a pipeline for hair creation. You need to consider that if you make hair in another software, how are you going to get that to Daz Studio? It's easy to make Strand-based hair in Blender and Xgen, but then what? You will need to be a PA to convert to strand hair in Daz Studio. Or you will need to convert it to mesh hair (which is good for real time video games but renders, not so much).
I will also say, if you watch tutorials for various different hair creation systems, you will notice they are often quite similar in terminologies and approaches. Often a tutorial for Xgen, Blender, and Ornitrix will have parallels with the SBH Editor in Daz Studio. So you can take same principles across from different software.
Thanks all for the responses to my questions. I kinda figured out how to use the daz hair creator somewhat. I still need to learn more about the complexity of this entire software. I notice that after I created my hair, I was pleased with it. But unfortunately I either did it wrong or my computer can't handle this software. I would think that my computer should easily handle this program though.
It is an intel i9 10900k , Asus Maximus XII Formula, 64gb 3600 Mhz Ram, and an Nvidia RTX 3090ti. Of course its water cooled so it hasn't been to hard on the system. I have bare minimum programs on the system so I can't really see if anything is interfering with Daz Studio. Is this computer not enough?
Anytime I load the character with the hair the system takes forever to load the character and editing takes even longer. I been wanting to learn more about Dforce but after watching some videos on youtube step by step, for some reason I can't apply all that is being covered. Some of the processes that is being done is just not working as I'm running through it. I may just give up using this program all together as it seems it may not be optimized atleast to work on my computer. Other programs seems to run pretty quickly. Video coverters, VamX and freecad most of which has not been reinstalled after reloading my entire Operating System.
Thanks for you help!
That system seems good on paper and you can expect Daz to work fine with it.
Does "load the character with the hair takes forever" mean that when you load each independently they load quickly, but together it is slow?
Loading a character into the scene takes a while if you have many morph products installed. Likewise, loading a heavy hair product can take a while to load into the scene, especially if you have made a very complex hairstyle with many strands (it's unclear if that's the case in your case).
If instead, you mean that the viewport is slow when they are both in the same scene file, for example, if rotating the camera around in the viewport is slow, it could be because the settings are wrong. Ensure Edit>Preferences>Display Optimisation is set to "Best". I think you should expect the viewport to be quite smooth with only a character and hair in the scene.
Also check which Draw Settings you are using in the viewport. The Nvidia preview is slower than the other viewport modes.
Posing a character with many fitted objects will be slow. So it is best to finalise pose before adding hair, clothing, etc.
Posing a character with high Viewport Subdivision (SubD) can be slow also. You can see the SubD level in Paramaters. So best to change Resolution to Base and only use HIgh Resolution after finished editing.
It might pay to be more specific about the problem encountered.
Thank you lilweep, You are very correct. I think the hair I created is what is slowing down the loading. I found that if I load other compatible hair in my library, everything seems to load faster.
As for the dforce issues I'm facing is that no matter which hair I load I can't seem to replicate what I watch on youtube. I can go through all the steps in the video up to selecting the region in geometry editor to apply dforce to, but as soon as I switch to Node weight map brush the selection disappears or deactivates. I tried both ways with the hair itself selected or dforce modifier weight node selected. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong in the process as a few videos on youtube the process is very similar between them, but none of the hair in the library even the ones that came bundled with the software seems to keep the selected region when switching to the node brush.
Again thank you for your valuble help.