Recommendations for extremely photoreal long hair?
Wonderland
Posts: 7,133
In the past I created only non-photoreal art with a lot of postwork to make characters look more 2D and stylized for mostly sci-fi and fantasy art and I have a ton of hair that looks great for that. But now I want to do some extremely photoreal images and I'm finding that many hair models, even with new Iray hair fix products don't look good because of the mesh, not the textures. I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for long hair that looks photoreal even in extreme close ups or with wind blowing, and that bends correctly, doesn't clump into sections, get jaggedy or have an unrealistic hair line. Hair for V4 through G3 that looks completely photorealistic with the right shaders... Thanks. And if you'd like to post your renders, great! :)
BTW, I do own a lot of the recent V7/G3 hairs but find in close-ups, even with the best shaders, they still don't look photoreal to me, including some of the go-to hairs that you see in many promos...
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Comments
The problem with modeled hair is that its a bunch of flat planes with a texture map and trans map on it to fake the look of hair so its not going to react or act like real hair at all.
Tha best solution is to use Garibaldi Hair or Look At My Hair. Both are native for 3Delight so if you want this done in Iray, you will need to export the hair as an OBJ when its all combed and import it back in as a solid item and then mess with the surface shader to get it to mimic real hair. I do recommend using a skull cap from a hair set like End of Summer hair to help fake a proper base. Personally it works well - http://mattymanx.deviantart.com/art/Elly-04-550913498 - Just dont paint the hair on it, paint of the figure instead.
Neither LAMH or Garibaldi work properly with G3F/G3M yet though. LAMH is getting an update to fix that soon, hopefully not too daz soon :P
It already is Daz-soon!
But I saw a post today stating it is being worked on, and something new is being worked on. :) So good news.
Look in the GH thread. There are UV maps painted up for G3F's head so you can use GH on her.
I really like Gregoria hair http://www.daz3d.com/gregoria-hair Might need a little work for Iray though.
one thing I've found with hairs I'd that applying subd often helps with the jaggedness and often autofit screws things up and loading the hair separate and parenting or manually adjusting gives better results
Some of SAV's hairs at Renderosity are also very high quality/realism, eg Athena Hair
This is one of the better ones in the store: http://www.daz3d.com/sage-hair-and-boho-headband-for-genesis-3-female-s
I may buy it soon.
Is that a freebie?
With this I agree completely we are halfway through 2016 and still using 1990's era transmapped flat ribbons for hair.
and the widely available PBR engines are making this depressingly obvious.
it comes with Carrara 8.5pro
the biggest issue with any HD long hair is how it lays on the body/clothing. We really need a good dynamic hair product. Maybe I need to try LAMH again for the tenth time to see if I can make something out of it this time around, I mean, 11th time's the charm, right?.
A G3 update is in DAZ QA hands already. Is that soon enough?
Kendall
Oh my, that is good news. I really need to learn how to use it.
I find LAMH pretty usable for regular short or very curly/fro-style hair. Anything more involved and my head explodes.
I mainly use it for fur and tweaking presets that come with various things. Even if I don't do anything much with the editor, I find the ability to access fiberhair invaluable.
I also occasionally use it for weird stuff like grass.
Depends how soon it takes them to OK it lol. I do recommend it for the fur, I might never get the hang of brushing enough to use it on human heads, other than maybe crew cuts, really short dude hair. I know I am going to be making brows and body hair with it at the least. :D
I did purchase LAMH when it was on sale, but haven't had a chance to try it yet. I'm more arty than techie, so now I'm teaching myself hair painting, which is time consuming, but easier for me right now then learning LAMH. I'm new to DS and just learning that. I think conforming the hair, does make it worse. I keep getting these strange jagged edges. I will try parenting next time. Short hair looks so much better than the longer hairs, but of course I prefer the longer hair.
I just remembered this hair, which is great! I wonder why it was never updated...
Quarker has not been active for a long time, sadly.
WIth LAMH 1.x presets, DO NOT parent them to anything -- it can cause crashes. The presets will follow the figure. adjust to poses and morph changes by default.
Kendall
I see an update in my DIM - is this the one? (ReadMe doesn't seem to have been updated so hard to tell?)
Yes that should be the one that fix G3 characters, LAMH 1.6.0.1. Available now...
Great, thank you
I so wish I could learn to use LAMH, but it leaves me feeling unhinged. Maybe I will try again.
This thread is a good reminder for me to have at least one shot in my animated film using Cinema4D's Excellent super fast hair module
Not a GI render here just Standard C4D lighting.
The beauty of C4D hair sytem is that I can bring in an animated Genesis mesh from Daz and select the polygons upon which I need to grow hair or fur and instant hair with dynamics & collisions
Plus C4D easy to use Styling & cutting tools.
Carrara strand dynamic hair is imo one of the most realistic hair solutions available. Here's a super simple hairstyle I made myself in about 10 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsz65nEkq5U
Especially if you need realistic hair in animations, it's simply the best option outside of spending gigantic money on cinema-level industry software solutions (Maya, 3DS, C4D, etc) and is actually nearly on par with and compares very favorably to even those uber-expensive pro softwares. It's very easy to create your own hair, style it however you like, and use it on any figure (I did a youtube video series on how to do it from scratch, much easier than I thought it would be when I started)
For static images though, if animating isn't a factor, I still think strand dynamic is always going to be the most realistic. Look at My hair, Blender dynamic hair, Carrara dynamic hair (the only one I kind of leave off the list is Poser dyamic hair, not because it doesn't have the potential to look realistic too, but because I reason it must be very very difficult to work with, as I haven't seen a good example of realistic hair rendering with it), just make sure the hair thickness is small enough that it actually looks like hair, some dynamic hair settings look way too thick, like a woman is growing vines out of her scalp instead of hair :)
BTW one piece of news that might be of interest to Studio users is that Philemo's VWD bridge he created I believe also has a function to turn Carrara dynamic hair into mesh, which if I understand correctly would mean you could now take any of the Carrara dynamic hairstyles out there in the store, turn them into mesh, and have them available to use in Studio (I may have this wrong though, and certainly haven't experimented with it myself yet).
Ir used to be impossible, but now with the Philemo plugin it should theoretically be possible. I have the plugin, but haven't used it yet (and my plans on using it were focused on using it as a bridge for VWD to make conforming clothing dynamic for animation, finding out about transferring carrara hair into Studio was pretty far down the list for me personally :) ) but I saw a thread in the Carrara forums mentioning both that the plugin would allow to turn Carrara hair into mesh and some early experiments from PhilW in doing so, trying to lock in on what would be the ideal settings for doing so. Might want to hop over and ask, because although I doubt PhilW has got to the point where he is trying to import into Studio, it looks like he's definitely involved in figuring outt the method for turning Carrara dynamic hair into actual mesh.
Oh and sidenote in that same thread, apparently Philemo is very close to releasing a VWD plugin for Studio too, or at least that's what I infer from the notes about the newest version of VWD being able to work with Studio via Philemo's plugin.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/59722/interested-in-a-new-cloth-sim-plug-in-for-carrara-please-show-your-support#latest