Poor gal's idea for dynamic hair
spearcarrier
Posts: 711
Because laziness is the mother of invention.
I hear a lot of talk about VWD, and although VWD would be great to have! I also would like a faster motherboard with more RAM and a computer that doesn't sigh and drag it's feet because I asked it to do something simple. I can't have either. (Edit: because I can't afford either. And I know I'm not the only one, thus this online thought.)
So this means that sometimes when I have a high fever and should be handling commissions, I start sticking my tongue into the sore tooth problem of DAZ's dynamic cloth engine.
Don't wanna go into a long list of complaints here. I was just thinking, and I've spent a couple of hours trying to implement the possible solution, but I used Blender. And something about !!!! Blender breaks my ability to convert to dynamics. Stupid Blender. (mutter)
But here was my idea.
Hair prop - in my case preferable a toon one as you guys have often seen me say. Add a headband that goes around the face from top of head to under chin. To be thorough you'd add one going around the forehead, too, but for this i added a straight band.
Weld points together so things don't fall apart, go through motions of making this piece dynamic.
The thought was that if the band were it's own zone, in the dynamic dialogue you'd set it to shrink and tighten as much as possible as well as be rigid so it wouldn't move. And it would hold the hair down on the figure's head. Ideally it would be an extension of the hair cap, which would have material zones set so you could set different constraints to different parts. The rest could be all dynamic and flowy and RAM eaty, Then you would just set that zone's material to 0%, so it wouldn't be seen. Not turn it off. Set it to 0%.
I got this to work one whole time in poser - and then poser flipped me the bird the way it does. So I have no way of knowing if it would work in DAZ. Sigh.
With my weak equipment I think I'll neverk now. So here's my idea set out there for others who like puzzles.
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Comments
I have a couple of vids via my sig about using VWD for hair; rendo has a forum for VWD too.
I've never used poser, so can't suggest what to do about it.
It does benefit from more cores, but will work with what you have - albeit slowly I expect.
Perhaps I should have been more clear about not being able to ****AFFORD**** VWD... and that this was a solution for people who also can't get it and probably won't be able to.... And if it's gonna be slow it would drive me crazy anyway! I posted this for folks who like to solve puzzles, anyway. If I wanted to talk about VWD as a solution I would have. LOL
the Stephanie hair at Optitex uses that idea, while it does not autofit to later figures, you can use the content creation tools to move the rigging around when conforming it so it sits on the head, I do this with rigged Optitex stuff often, it only needs to roughly follow the shape as draping takes care of the rest.
At one point I had the bright idea of using dynamics to simulate liquids, but I kept either getting errors or falling through mesh, and VWD lacks the internal pressure to give the liquid some depth.
@the3Ddigit: it does? I had looked around for the hair and couldn't find much. They've pretty much dropped the ball on so much. Go to their website and it's all blank pages. The last time I bought something - it was supposed to be a pack of stuff - I never got my download and they never answered my query. Oh well.
I'm glad to know my idea is sound then. I don't need need the dynamic hair thanks to that script by mcasual, but it would be nice to have. So I've been working on it. I'll post my proof of concept below.
Here's how I did it:
Took dreads hair by Littlefox and put it on a mask created out of Kururu's head.
Because I wasn't interested in beauty, just a workable mesh, I used blender to automatically delete doubles and get the items "sewn" together. It looks a little messy as a result. Then to get the mesh to behave I had to save and resave it various times through poser and decimate in Blender at least twice.
While doing this I learned that dynamic meshes work best when they're similar to how you would want a 3D object ready for printing would be: diamonds and watertight.
When I finally had a mesh that poser could turn into dynamic cloth without my computer thinking too hard, I saved that as a smart prop and brought it into poser.
The script to convert doesn't like to convert a lot of stuff for me, though, so this is where I had to use the VWD program. (I ended up getting it for Christmas.) I didn't use it to animate the hair - that would defeat my purpose. Instead I used it to create a VWD object. The script will find those and convert them normally.
When converting I figured out that if you put the default UV in, that creates a mess. So I left off the UV.
The settings as a result don't all work, so the object absolutely has to fit from the get go. So all of the settings are down to 1 except weight, which is why the hair is behaving so straight and firm. I have it at about 500. I also turn up friction as that makes a small difference. If I turned up the weight on the mask the mask had problems so it's set to all settings as low as possible except friction.
In the preferences I have internal pressure up as high as it will go to help the tubes keep their shape. That does seem to make a small difference as well.
Poser is a jerk that will make things slightly bigger for collision sake so the mask lost its size slightly. While draping it slid up her face a bit, but it still held. So she's got a super high hairline.
Sadly during all this I lost the UV mapping - to be precise VWD took it away.
timmins, that would have been neat. I know that DAZ has a particle engine that does liquids, but what bothers me about it is they're presets. You don't get to design your own. But I guess you gotta start somewhere. I found a cluster of stars in my runtime library while cleaning the other day and turned them dynamic for the fun of it. Now I have this cluster of stars that twinkle as they slowly fall... or fall upware because the default UV does that.
I would find and link it but its a paid item.
some commercial links are allowed I see but mine get removed.
Maybe it's for the best. In my case i'm more interested in toon style hair, especially stuff that has more than one region hopefully with rigging such as Littlefox's older stuff. The hair you mention is probably too realistic for my needs. =^-^=
I've got a second hair draping right now. It drapes slower than the first, but I'm definitely coming out with a work flow on this stuff.