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As ChangelingChick said, the specific hairstyle you are asking about can make the difference for sure. Just by what I read in your question, it does seem like it's the transparency maps on that hair. Some (especially older hairs) don't have the best transparency maps to begin with. 3Delight and the Poser render engines handle transparency differently than Iray does, so you could almost get away with chunkier maps, which is why a lot of them look too thin and whispy in Iray when converted over to the Iray Uber shaders. The hair artists have since learned to do their transparency maps differently, resulting in a better look without the need for adjusting the cutout opacity. But that is why the presets are there in UHT (and in UHT2), to compensate for that.
Does the hair in question have different material zones? If so, I would try different cutout opacities on the different sections. For example, hair that is underneath might have a higher cutout opacity so that not a light of gaps will appear, but the outer hairs and whispy bangs, etc. might need a lower cutout opacity so that they remain thin and light. Advanced users might even want to use the Geometry Editor on Daz Studio to assign a different material zone to those problem areas and then treat them differently on their own.
To directly answer your question, though, UHT2 does not have anything especially different to address this issue. In either version of UHT, you can combine the Cutout Opacity settings with the Translucency Settings to get different transparency effects. The two settings work very closely together to affect the look of the transparency.
Hi DaWaterRat (seeing your nickname always makes me chuckle)... When I started UHT2, I had intended to try to make it 3Delight compatible as well, but as I started adding more and more "features" to it in the utilities, I began to realize that the 3Delight shaders did not offer some of the options that I wanted to include.. the biggest of them being the tiling of individual textures. UHT2 tiles the Base Color, the Translucency Color, as well as the glossiness and normal maps, but does not tile the Cutout Opacity (transparency) maps. I was not able to replicate this with 3Delight shaders and this is an integral part of being able to use the Color Mixer effectively.
The Color Mixer takes your new "mix" and applies it to both the Base Color and Translucency Color channels... that being said, Color Mixer will still work, even with 3Delight shaders. You can apply a color mix over a omUberSurface or AoA SSS Shader and it will mix the color in without overriding any of the other 3Delight settings. The problem then lies with wanting to tile that new mix over the hair. The masks in Color Mixer are a bit to chunky sometimes to get a good look without any tiling whatsoever, so the results might not be as desirable. I know some will probably not want to watch videos, so here is a screenshot of Color Mixer... you can see the interface is not overly complicated, and I even included step by step instructions right on the interface:
As for mixing the hair first on a Iray shader hair, then transferring the textures to a 3Delight setup manually... yes, you can do that as well. If I could write a script that would do that transfer for us in one click, I would do that, but so far I haven't been able to figure it out. And the renders times to test these settings over and over again as I tweaked them was killing me, if I'm being honest. This example shows just that: I applied UHT2 to the hair surfaces, used color mixer to add some blonde streaks, then converted the hair to omUberSurface, then plugged the UHT2 textures into the appropriate blocks. For some reason, 3Delight does not like my normal and bump maps from UHT2, so in the bump slot, I used the UHT2 Shine map, and in the displacement as well. Put nothing in the normal map slot. Then substituted the UHT2 Shine map everywhere that a grayscale image was used in the original texture (not counting transparency, of course. Use those original maps). Finally, I turned on Translucency, used the same map as the Diffuse Color, and set it to 50%.
Edit: Just thinking about it... another option: If you can navigate to the UHT2 texture folders, you can plug in the base colors and all the bump, spec, etc. directly into the 3DL shader, then run Color Mixer for your streaks and highlights. Save some steps that way. The result is exactly the same, but with less "converting back and forth".
So, as you can see below, either method will give some nice 3Delight Hair. I have provided 42 masks to use in Color Mixer, so you will have to experiment with them to get the proper "chunkiness" of your streaks, since tiling the result is not an option for 3Delight. To compare, here is the hair with A. The default Brown Texture that came with the hair, B. The Color Mixer used over original Brown, and C. UHT2 applied first, Color Mixed, then manually converted back to omUberSurface and the new maps plugged in. The last option is kind of a long, roundabout way of doing it, but it gives nice results. In a future version or update, I might be able to crack the 3Delight mystery and get UHT2 to work natively with 3Delight.
There's UberSurface2. You can have two different surfaces and a mask between the two. Each of those three things can be tiled independently of the others. Of course, Slosh would then have to put a requirement of people to own that other vendor's product.
Slosh could come up with a unique hair shader for UHT2! Adding a tiler per channel is... actually not terribly hard, really.
Mind you, these are both huge time sucks that wouldn't be worth investing in. But hey. ;)
I'm looking forward to this! You know I'm a UHT super-fan.
I just checked with Marketing and there will be an additional discount for those who have previously bought UHT (1). I'm not too sure on the details, but they set it up for me despite me asking for it last minute, so Big Cookie for Daz Marketing.
Oh nice! That's the kind of consideration that makes me a loyal Daz customer.
Thanks :) The hair in question is End of Summer Hair, which definitely does have different mat zones. Your reply gave me an idea though: I could use the original opacity maps instead of the ones included with UHT and see if that makes a difference...
oh, mtl1! That hair (and others by Neftis) are notoriously difficult. I'm not trying to speak ill of Neftis, but it is a fact that their uvs are not setup traditionally. UHT2 still looks good on EOS hair, as well as Allanah hair and Wildmane hair, and City Dove hair. However, it's not a perfect system on those hairs. For my personal use, I have redone the uvs on Allanah hair, and might have done on End of Summer (can't remember), but of course I can't share those :(
Bluuuh, maybe I'll try to redo the UV myself... it'll be a good way for me to learn remapping anyhow :)
Good luck! I have a bit of a knack for uvs (if you've seen my store, you know that already, lol) and I had a heck of a time.
What he said!
Really looking forward to the launch!
oh thank you! that video was perfect! Loved the 'colour mixer' option too.
Wondering if I'm the only one who, while watching this when you were trying to remember which base and which mask you used for Julius, sat here saying "yep, that' one", and "yep, that's the right one you used" out loud. *laughs*
lol, jakiblue! I think I was on take 4 or 5 of that video and was pretty much "over it" by that time :)
Just now I converted Danae's Edinburgh for M4 to Iray (then applied it to G2M using M4forG2M) and of course, he needed hair. So, being a ginger such as he is, I used UHT2 to mix some nice ginger hair for him :)
hair is nice and all but
how about selling the skin conversion of danae products ?
Great job Slosh! So many hairs look unrecognisable and so much better, will definitely be recommending :D
Heh
I didn't get it to look as good as the skin in Danae's promos. There is a huge problem with the bump maps, so I had to create my own and they didn't come out as well as I would have liked
Thanks, April :) Been wanting to reach you about this, but haven't seen you around lately.
Hey guess what! It's out :D
Yep it's out, just posted it on my facebook haha, very cool stuff. 8)
Slosh, yeah I'm always around, just don't post much because busy lazy reasons lol.
April... Check your PMs...
Yep, and in my cart it and the color add-on went! I just wish I could install immediately. It seems I always have a render going when the stuff I want to play with immediately shows up in the store!
..Slosh, thank you for the explanation on the previous page.
So I hear a lot about this working primarily on "Iray hair". I have maybe 4 or 5 Iray hairs at best, everything else is I have 3DL (I still even use Koz's hairs on occasion). So I take it this is kind of like the original UHT but "on Steroids" (for lack of a better phrase).
In looking at the colour mixer control sample you posted above, it seems a bit similar to DraagonStorm & Zev0's Skin Builder Pro which I use a lot.
Oh and there's a trick I learned for hair with transparency maps that look to thin in Iray. You can set the parameters for Cutout Opacity higher than 1.0 (I usually set it between 1.5 and 1.75). One of my characters who uses Osean Hair looked like she was going bald from radiation exposure, when I increased the opacity of the transparency layers, it looked just as good as in the product promo..
...umm folks. It's live:
http://www.daz3d.com/uht2-ultimate-color
http://www.daz3d.com/uht2-fantasy-colors
...aww bugger ChangelingChick and April beat me to it. Curse my slow connection.
Yup, there are presets for this included with UHT2
...that will certianly make life easier.
LOL! :)
Just saw it was out - congrats!!! :)
On the wishlist for the moment (and remember, that's me saying I love the product, will get it when my finances are better, definitely want to support it, ok? *grin* )
This product looks fantastic - glad to see it available in the store :) All the pictures look very realistic, but almost all looks like hair that is dry (too much sun, too many perms...) - is it possible to add shine with this product and create a picture of someone who has realistic looking hair with shine? Thanks! -Cathy
This is pretty amazing. I've been trying out various color mixes and noticed that if you apply a mix from the Color Mixer script and then hit Undo, the base color change is undone but the Translucency Color does not get undone.