Reminder To Myself: Never again SBH Hair
Masterstroke
Posts: 2,492
in The Commons
Please, find a working replacement for dforce! It's slow and its results are more than often unwanted. Like explosions and weird forces towards the x-axis.
When it comes to simulation speed, SBH hair is the worst.
I've just purchased a SBH hair product, that finally fits my workflow, only to find out, that it might take about half an hour of simulation time.
Other software have cloth and hair simulation in real time.
Dforce is obviously outdated.
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meh, mine can take several hours and 5GB save files
yeah, stopped buying it too
Dforce cloth hair better
Well, yeah. It's strand based hair (SBH). It is simulating individual strands of hair. Other hair is faster because the hair is approximated with polygons. This has nothing to do with dForce and all to do with individual hairs. I've never had a hair sim last more than 10 minutes. But maybe my hardware is better. Also never seen a 5 GB save file. Not sure what's up with that.
SBH is only good for portraits. I don't do portraits... end of.
I do animations hence the times and save sizes
Carrara dynamic hair not that ridiculous
and not locked to PAs
Probably it helps disabling collisions among strands.
Animating in daz with SBH, quite the masochist arent you ?
Which DS version are you using? Tesslation 0 was added at least a couple of years ago, but you have to be using at least the latest version at that time. You will also need the latest version of the resources and shaders file.
This is usually the first thing I do with simulated hair. It might work in some cases, but often it results in totally flat collapsed hair, without really signifficant simulation time saving.
I found SBH hair largely unusable before Iray supported curves natively (ie hair could be dropped to tessation 0 and still look good).
On my machine dForce tends to simulate in 5-15 seconds, and render times are at least as fast as polygon hair. There are a few items I own with longer simulation times, but never more than 2-3 mins, I don't have the patience for anything longer than that.
What are your system specs and which ver of DS are you using?
I am using a PC with 64 GB Ram and an RTX 3060 12 GB gpu.
Just because something is SBH or "dForce SBH" doesnt mean it was intended for simulation.
"dforce SBH" is just the name of of the system used to make SBH hair. The "dforce" aspect of the name in some cases is a misnomer and does not always mean it will simulate.
Can you share with us the documentation for that so we can better understand how all this works?
Documentation? This is intended as humor?
I asked DAZ AI (Victoria) a similar question a few days ago; "Why do some of my dForce hair products not simulate?" I don't remember the answer verbatim so I just asked again, and this is how it was explained:
"Some hair products are built using the dForce hair system, but the creator never intended the final product to actually run a simulation. They use the dForce tools mainly to help design or generate the hair strands, then leave the hair as a static asset in the final product.
So even though the name includes “dForce,” the hair may:
This naming can definitely be confusing, because “dForce hair” doesn’t always mean it will simulate."
Granted, DAZ AI isn't always completely accurate so I'm reluctant to say this is "official" DAZ documentation.
dForce Hair just means it is using the dForce hair system, which is distinct from Strand-Based Hair (dForce Hair can be made from imported mesh from another application, it doesn't have to be built with SBH). Whether, and to what extent, it allows simulation is up to the PA. So Victoria is pretty much correct here.
I dont think there is any documentation, but that agrees with what has been said in threads on this forum over the years.
Hair physics systems in most software are not actually simulating every single strand of hair, that would be a pretty computationally expensive/stupid way to do it. Obviously aglorithms have come a long way, and it's no longer fantasy to have a sim do such things. But certainly in blender today and daz today, simulation is done on proxy strands, not every single strand.
In Daz dforce hair, my understanding is that the guide strands (and the PS strands) are the proxies that get simulated and then the children hairs just follow. Not every hair strand simulates.
So that means for a dforce hair to actually be simulatable, the PA/Vendor should set the hair up with guide strands/ps strands and then children hairs get generated inside daz. But some Daz PAs clearly do not want to generate the children hairs within Daz studio because the hairs look better in the the software where they author them. Those PAs bring in every single strand of hair instead of just a minimal number of guide strands. They still convert the hair to dforce hair to get access to other properties, but the hair is not going to be simulatable with so many guide strands. They will probably have changed the dforce sim settings to stop it from simulating.
Anyways, the confusing nomenclature probably leads to many returns and sales queries, so it's strange that Daz has not changed the naming conventions yet.
Thanks for confirming that, Richard! While SBH is a bit of a challenge for my PC (actually, it has more to do with my impatience), I've learned that some dForce hair works really well for me. Initially I made the mistake of avoiding dForce hair altogether.
We should remember that a lot of hair styles in the physical world don't move much - they have gel or laquer holding them in place, they have been given curls or waves that are heat or chemically set in place etc.
Any DS strand-based hair is likely to use guide hairs and then interpolate additional hairs between them at render time - that is not inherently linked to the hair being set up for simulation.
SBH can also mean different things to different people. "Strand-based" hair is a general term used outside of Daz Studio to refer to hair grooms that are strands as opposed to cards etc. You seem to be using "SBH" to refer to the type of object that is generated in Daz Studio by the "SBH Editor".
It doesnt really help matters that there are effectively two definitions "SBH" which has a weak definition and "dforce" which is just a confusing definition.
Daz Studio could perhaps put "simulation ready" or "not simulation ready" somewhere on the product to add clarity/distinctions between both cases. But most people see dforce and assume it is simulation ready, so it can lead to frustration if it isnt.
The guide hairs ar what can be edited, interpolated hairs are generated from the guides (the relative proportions of one to the other being set in the SBH Editor or in dForce setup). None of us have access to the dForce hair set-up tools, however, so we can go only by results or what is mentioned in the change logs.
I don't like it for human hair but its really good for fur. No need to simulate and it renders really fast. There is nothing better for fur.