Sculpting Strand-Based Hair [SOLVED]

MrRogerSmith

I know this has been discussed before but I'm desperate for any new, innovative ideas.

Strand-based hair has taken over the Daz store.  Some of the best hair PA's who previously used mesh hair have switched over and it's really hard to find high quailty mesh hair anymore.

But we're not always lucky enough for hair to fit correctly right out of the box.  So many of these beautiful hairs float above the shoulders, poke into the breasts or collars, or don't fall correctly when the head is tilted.

For mesh hair, this is an easy fix.  If Mesh Grabber isn't enough then mesh hair can be taken into Blender or ZBrush, fixed pretty quickly, and brought back into Daz.

For strand-based hair, such fixes appear to be impossible.  Supposedly the hair has dforce and so the simulation is supposed to fall naturally and avoid such problems.  But we all know that dforce on strand-based hair is half a step above worthless.  It's comical to watch the hair move half an inch during the simulation, still clipping the clothes or not even falling on the shoulders.

But sculpting strand-based hair is impossible.  Mesh Grabber doesn't work on it, and when taking the strand-based hair into ZBrush, there's an error message; ZBrush won't even load the hair.  Blender will at least load the hair and you can sculpt it IF you send it over with visible tesselations, but of course the geometry is ruined and it won't come back to Daz.

This means that, for me at least, the Daz store is pumping out worthless hair after worthless hair.  I can't imagine buying any more of this stuff because I can't use it unless I can manipulate it.  I would love to see the PAs go back to selling mesh hair.  Outoftouch, for example, used to make so many beautiful mesh hairs, but now it's all just strand-based.  At this point the only solution seems to be move the scene into Blender, but if I'm doing that then why would I purchase more hairs from the Daz store when I can just use something like Global Hair in Blender?

Does anyone have any idea of how to fix these issues?

barbult

Copied and pasted from a post I made in April 2025: 

With Geometry Editor tool active, you can export the "curves" hair, move the vertices in a modeler, and with the Geometry Editor still active, import your modified OBJ to DS to create a morph. You do not have to be a PA to do that. I have made several morphs for PA dForce (strand-based) hair products that way.  I have posted this in the forums a couple of times at least. You can even simulate in DS and export that and reimport it as a morph. The key is to have the Geometry Editor tool active during export and import. There can be millions of vertices in some of these hairs, so the morph creation can take some time.

MrRogerSmith

barbult said:

Copied and pasted from a post I made in April 2025: 

With Geometry Editor tool active, you can export the "curves" hair, move the vertices in a modeler, and with the Geometry Editor still active, import your modified OBJ to DS to create a morph. You do not have to be a PA to do that. I have made several morphs for PA dForce (strand-based) hair products that way.  I have posted this in the forums a couple of times at least. You can even simulate in DS and export that and reimport it as a morph. The key is to have the Geometry Editor tool active during export and import. There can be millions of vertices in some of these hairs, so the morph creation can take some time. 

OH MY GOD IT WORKED, IT ACTUALLY WORKED!

BARBULT I LOVE, YOU YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

Seriously, thank you!  That is amazing!  All of a sudden I own dozens of hairs that seem viable again. 

barbult

Wonderful!

jmucchiello

barbult said:

Copied and pasted from a post I made in April 2025: 

With Geometry Editor tool active, you can export the "curves" hair, move the vertices in a modeler, and with the Geometry Editor still active, import your modified OBJ to DS to create a morph. You do not have to be a PA to do that. I have made several morphs for PA dForce (strand-based) hair products that way.  I have posted this in the forums a couple of times at least. You can even simulate in DS and export that and reimport it as a morph. The key is to have the Geometry Editor tool active during export and import. There can be millions of vertices in some of these hairs, so the morph creation can take some time.

How does someone who doesn't even understand "export the curves hair" step and has never run a modeler even begin to do this? Asking for a friend. :) I posted elsewhere looking for help with upside down hair and this seems like the right solution, if only I knew anything about Blender.

 

Gordig

If it used to be necessary to switch to the Geometry Editor in order to export curves, it no longer is.

crosswind

Gordig said:

If it used to be necessary to switch to the Geometry Editor in order to export curves, it no longer is.

Not 100% sure if that depends on what external application is used but if with Blender, as far as I can tell, Geometry Editor has to be activated when exporting / importing the polylines otherwise the vertex count will mismatch when making morphs with MLP. 

MrRogerSmith

jmucchiello said:

barbult said:

Copied and pasted from a post I made in April 2025: 

With Geometry Editor tool active, you can export the "curves" hair, move the vertices in a modeler, and with the Geometry Editor still active, import your modified OBJ to DS to create a morph. You do not have to be a PA to do that. I have made several morphs for PA dForce (strand-based) hair products that way.  I have posted this in the forums a couple of times at least. You can even simulate in DS and export that and reimport it as a morph. The key is to have the Geometry Editor tool active during export and import. There can be millions of vertices in some of these hairs, so the morph creation can take some time.

How does someone who doesn't even understand "export the curves hair" step and has never run a modeler even begin to do this? Asking for a friend. :) I posted elsewhere looking for help with upside down hair and this seems like the right solution, if only I knew anything about Blender.

 

You hide everything in the scene except the hair, put it at base resolution, activate the geometry tool, and export the hair as an .obj via the File menu.  WP Guru has some good videos like this one showing how to export/reimport to make morphs in Blender.

To be honest though I wouldn't start my journey in Blender with these strand-based hairs.  They are quite dense and trying to make the morph in Blender's edit mode isn't nearly as easy as sculpting it.  Working with so many vertices is probably a bit too advanced for someone brand new to Blender.

MrRogerSmith

Gordig said:

If it used to be necessary to switch to the Geometry Editor in order to export curves, it no longer is.

This hasn't been my experience.  If you have an alternative workflow, please share it. 

Richard Haseltine

MrRogerSmith said:

jmucchiello said:

barbult said:

Copied and pasted from a post I made in April 2025: 

With Geometry Editor tool active, you can export the "curves" hair, move the vertices in a modeler, and with the Geometry Editor still active, import your modified OBJ to DS to create a morph. You do not have to be a PA to do that. I have made several morphs for PA dForce (strand-based) hair products that way.  I have posted this in the forums a couple of times at least. You can even simulate in DS and export that and reimport it as a morph. The key is to have the Geometry Editor tool active during export and import. There can be millions of vertices in some of these hairs, so the morph creation can take some time.

How does someone who doesn't even understand "export the curves hair" step and has never run a modeler even begin to do this? Asking for a friend. :) I posted elsewhere looking for help with upside down hair and this seems like the right solution, if only I knew anything about Blender.

 

You hide everything in the scene except the hair, put it at base resolution, activate the geometry tool, and export the hair as an .obj via the File menu.  WP Guru has some good videos like this one showing how to export/reimport to make morphs in Blender.

The OBJ export options now include one to export only seelcted geometry, so the hiding step is no longer required.

To be honest though I wouldn't start my journey in Blender with these strand-based hairs.  They are quite dense and trying to make the morph in Blender's edit mode isn't nearly as easy as sculpting it.  Working with so many vertices is probably a bit too advanced for someone brand new to Blender.

Gordig

I suppose it may make a difference that I only ever export Daz strand-based hair one way. I can port it to C4D or Houdini without switching to Geometry Editor, but I've never tried to bring it back into DS.