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Garibaldi Express: Hair and Fur Plugin Beta [Commercial]

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  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Spyro said:
    Resampling curves, is that a slow down as well?
    Well resampling the style curves won't make things hugely slower but the reducing the interpolation segment length of the hair strands will.
    Normally you would set the style curve segment length and the hair strand segment lengths to be the same to keep things optimal.
    But what I would generally advise is to keep the segment lengths as big as you can while being able to get the detail level you desire.
  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    DaremoK3 said:
    One thing to note though, the individual hair widget was sort of working in beta 10. Before, I couldn't even select an arrow. It just selected empty space, and deselected the hair. It was working painfully slow, and cumbersome though, so I gave up on trying to use it. I'll try again in beta 11.

    I'm not sure what you mean, do you mean the point editing mode in the editor?
    If so yeah, it doesn't work correctly yet. No one seemed to care about it, so fixing it dropped down the priorities on my list, but hopefully soon it'll work as planned.
  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited January 2013

    mjc1016 said:

    I didn't bother to style it or anything...just slapped some hair on it and rendered, so of course it isn't pretty...

    So the issue with hair missing on some triangles has been fixed for the future beta 12 (some time this week).
    It will fix the issues seen in your attached image and hopefully some other cases.
    Post edited by futurebiscuit on
  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited January 2013

    -Yannek- said:
    Ok, I managed to add another layer of hair with the same styling by saving the scene, merging it, deleting unwanted elements and reparenting the merged hair to the original figure.

    Thats basically what I did in those scenes to add those 'fluff' nodes.
    I haven't quite worked out how the whole copying node thing works in Daz.
    Post edited by futurebiscuit on
  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited January 2013

    If you've been wondering where I've been, I have had a few days off around new years from Garibaldi Express.
    But don't worry a new Beta version with plenty of fixes and a few new minor features coming later this week.

    Post edited by futurebiscuit on
  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    Spyro said:
    59 mins total at 100%. Same lighting. Same size (1500x1500px). Higher Head hair density. As it turns out, I could have doubled the Pony Tail hair density and it would still render faster than the 2hr at 50% without the hair tie and separate nodes. - I used two nodes (Amount 350 and 450) on the hair tie... It requires several nodes as there isnt enough surface space, none the less, there is a decent amount of verts for curves, to work with in styling.

    I posted a render using that technique a couple of weeks ago...

    And yeah, you either need to subdivide the heck out of it or use a couple of nodes. On of the things I found is that if you make a filled circle, in Blender, by extruding the outer edge in, several times, before having them all meet in the center and then subdividing that in Blender, you can get a better/more faces to use. I can't remember, exactly how many...but I was getting the best results, for a single node, starting with a couple of hundred faces...I'll run a couple of more tests.

    futurebiscuit said:

    I didn't bother to style it or anything...just slapped some hair on it and rendered, so of course it isn't pretty...

    So the issue with hair missing on some triangles has been fixed for the future beta 12 (some time this week).
    It will fix the issues seen in your attached image and hopefully some other cases.

    Good...that was one thing that I couldn't figure out how to fix. Just the way many of those older models were mapped, overall the base mesh isn't too bad...just the textures and UV mapping really suck. Yeah, a lot of them could use some help in some areas, but with 'real' fur they end up being a lot more useful. Next task with an older animal...getting a decent sheep.

  • DaremoK3DaremoK3 Posts: 798
    edited December 1969

    Hey James,

    Yes, the point editing mode in the editor. That is what I was referring to.

    I am aware of the issue with it, but thought maybe you did some work on it to try and get it going.

    I found It was actually something I did on my end that made it seem like you worked on the coding. I updated my graphics drivers which allowed me to select the points and widget arrows, and move them around a little.

    Thanks for letting me know it's still broken. I look forward to you getting it working, because I believe it will be a great asset for fine detailing.


    Also, I encountered a fatal crash in beta 11. I didn't have the time to document the crash, but the jist of it is that I was working with combining four previously saved Garibaldi hair nodes on a new Genesis model.

    Because the nodes were from different Genesis models they retained the attributes of their original owners. Even after changing owners, and updating in the editor which did not work until after I saved a new DUF scene, reloaded, and then the editor allowed the update.

    The crash came when I missed a node, and realized while in the editor. I foolishly chose to press the update button, and DS froze, then hard crashed with fatal error.

  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited December 1969

    This plug in is excellent! I'm very excited to finally be able to mess around with making hair from scratch. I find it fairly easy to get decent results and I have seen a lot of amazing renders from the beta testers here.

    It would be great for launch to have nice documentation and several presets for hair styles, maps, lights, shader settings, etc. to make the plug in more accessible. I understand it might be far off but I would love to eventually see mesh export for use with things like Reality. I have not used Reality yet but I hear it's a lot faster & easier to get good results and I have seen some incredible renders done with it.

    I am having some issues with a strange graphic glitch & stability if I slide a morph dial on a genesis figure wearing the hair. It seems avoidable by entering numeric changes instead of sliding the dial. The glitch usually remains until I reopen the file and it sometimes slows my system down and crashes DS. I'm guessing my system just can't handle rapid morph changes with the hair. Attached is an image of the glitch and here is my system info in case it helps: Intel Core 2 Duo 3 GHz, 6 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 560 w/4GB, Windows 7 64 bit.

    Thanks.

    glitch.jpg
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  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited December 1969

    Here is my first attempt. I need to spend some more time to get familiar with all the hair styling tools, get better at lighting the hair and tweaking the shader. I was late to hear about this plugin but finally caught up reading through the entire thread. It's nice to see so many amazing renders and all the useful info that has been posted.

    mohawk5.jpg
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  • SedorSedor Posts: 1,764
    edited December 1969

    Swawa said:

    I am having some issues with a strange graphic glitch & stability if I slide a morph dial on a genesis figure wearing the hair. It seems avoidable by entering numeric changes instead of sliding the dial. The glitch usually remains until I reopen the file and it sometimes slows my system down and crashes DS. I'm guessing my system just can't handle rapid morph changes with the hair. Attached is an image of the glitch and here is my system info in case it helps: Intel Core 2 Duo 3 GHz, 6 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 560 w/4GB, Windows 7 64 bit.

    Thanks.

    Regarding the glitch which display optimization have you set? I've seen this glitches sometimes when the graphics card can't work with the current settings - it helps to go one level down. When you have finished this scene you can change it back.

    Bildschirmfoto_2013-01-09_um_16.49_.50_.png
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  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited December 1969

    I had it set on "best". So far lowering it to "Better" seems to help, although moving my camera becomes a bit laggy but as you said I can always switch it based on what I'm doing at the time. Thanks!

  • SedorSedor Posts: 1,764
    edited December 1969

    Yes, it becomes a little bit slower - but as you said, you can switch always between best/better just as it is needed.

    Fine :)

  • PuntomausPuntomaus Posts: 450
    edited December 1969

    I made a faerie punk ... love the plug in :)

    Punk.jpg
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  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited January 2013

    DaremoK3 said:
    I updated my graphics drivers which allowed me to select the points and widget arrows, and move them around a little.
    So the arrows didn't work prior to beta 11. Anyway, I'm glad it's working better for you now,


    Because the nodes were from different Genesis models they retained the attributes of their original owners. Even after changing owners, and updating in the editor which did not work until after I saved a new DUF scene, reloaded, and then the editor allowed the update.

    The crash came when I missed a node, and realized while in the editor. I foolishly chose to press the update button, and DS froze, then hard crashed with fatal error.


    So some things have been reworked and fixed relating to connecting Garibaldi nodes and updating the geometry in the editor for beta 12. Hopefully the issues you experienced will be fixed. Beta 12 should be ready for the 11/12th.
    Post edited by futurebiscuit on
  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Swawa said:
    It would be great for launch to have nice documentation and several presets for hair styles, maps, lights, shader settings, etc. to make the plug in more accessible.
    So yes, more documentation etc is coming, currently the goal has mostly to get the software to a more robust state. Unfortunately with anything like this it can be a bit frustrating to try and work out what, how and why things are.

    I am having some issues with a strange graphic glitch & stability if I slide a morph dial on a genesis figure wearing the hair.

    Do you get the same issues if you remove the hair node from your scene? The graphic issues appear to be affecting only your character geometry?
  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited December 1969

    futurebiscuit said:

    Do you get the same issues if you remove the hair node from your scene? The graphic issues appear to be affecting only your character geometry?

    Looks like the clothes are being distorted too but they are following the figure so it could just be the figure. I've been using DAZ for about half a year and this never happened before. It only happens after adding a hair node to the scene and then setting it up. Sometimes it just happens for a second other times it stays. Sometimes it stays even after deleting the hair node. Re-opening the file fixes it until it happens again. Sometimes it leads to a crash. Also note that so far I never had the glitch while the display optimization was set to "better" and this setting also instantly fixes it. So I'm assuming my graphics card just can't handle the "best" optimization with the hair splines?

  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    I haven't had a problem with morphing the character wearing GH or adding clothing to a character wearing GH... However, Daz crashes if I try to fit a GH on a different character from which it was made on.

  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited December 1969

    I've been trying to work with the "Catgirl Genesis" character and it's killing my system. It has several Geografted parts. I had 6 nodes on 6 different parts but tried cutting it down to 4 and that did not help. I have maps for color (base/tip) and density on all of them. When I try to render or sometimes in the hair setup my computer gets so slow my mouse stutters at like 1 frame per second and my hard drive reads like crazy. Tried to check my ram but I could not even switch back to task manager. I know there are lots of settings and things I could try to optimize (I took notes on this entire thread) but I have difficulty accessing them with this file without crashing. I did start out with defaults and modified it a little to get the look I wanted. Just curious if this can be optimized or if I'm just trying to do too much with this plug-in on my system? Maybe Geografted parts the issue? Has anyone had success doing full furry figures with Geografted parts on a system close to mine?

    I also noticed that I was importing a ton of duplicate maps as separate images to have them match the names of the surfaces. Not sure if it would help but is there any way to have it use 1 map for several surfaces when I import density/color maps? It just seems horribly inefficient loading dozens of extra unnecessary images.

    Thanks in advance if anyone can help. Otherwise on my system I might just be limited to simple hair styles. Or maybe it will be optimized by final release.

    Intel Core 2 Duo 3 GHz, 6 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 560 w/4GB, Windows 7 64 bit.

    tiger_16.png
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  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    Swawa said:
    When I try to render or sometimes in the hair setup my computer gets so slow my mouse stutters at like 1 frame per second and my hard drive reads like crazy.
    So basically it sounds like you're running out of memory when rendering. A few things you can try are (in a vague order):

    * Don't use ray traced shadows with your lights or reflections in your materials.
    * Set the rendering mode to 'Disk Cache' in the Garibaldi Node rendering options (will be the default for new hair nodes in beta 12+).
    * Reduce the Pixel Samples X/Y and Shadow Samples in the advanced Daz rendering options (this will reduce the render quality but also reduce render time and memory).
    * Reduce the bucket size in the advanced Daz rendering options (this may slow down rendering a little, but result will stay the same).
    * Don't use 'UberLights' or at least reduce the settings.
    * Use less hair strands (You can quickly lower this with the 'Render Percent' in the Garibaldi Node rendering options).
    * Use a larger segment length for the hair strands (set with the 'seg length' option in the interpolation options of the style workspace).

    It just seems horribly inefficient loading dozens of extra unnecessary images.


    Yes, it's not great, but the images are compressed in memory when not in use, and on the scale of things there relative memory usage should not be too great.
  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited December 1969

    Thanks, that was very helpful, I followed all of that and it did the trick. I can render the character now with no problems! Quality is a bit down but render speed is super fast so I can experiment to improve it. I just have to be careful not to crank the settings up too high in hair setup or it locks up so I can't fix it and have to delete the hair node & start over.

    I'm always pushing my system and ran out of memory before (especially when I had 2 instead of 6gb) but it usually just resulted in an error or program crash. I never had my entire system freeze up like this and had to hit restart while the hard drive was reading like mad. Is there anyway to build in a safety to stop it before it gets to this point?

    I also wanted to add that my wacom tablet has been very slow and laggy when using it to style hair, sometimes even just to paint density.

    Despite these issues it's still is a great plugin and I'm very happy with what it can do. Thanks again for the help.

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    Swawa said:
    I'm always pushing my system and ran out of memory before (especially when I had 2 instead of 6gb) but it usually just resulted in an error or program crash. I never had my entire system freeze up like this and had to hit restart while the hard drive was reading like mad. Is there anyway to build in a safety to stop it before it gets to this point?

    I don't see what the problem was...your system was working perfectly...the hard drive activity was swap file usage and it was churning away at the render. Just like it was designed to do...when the system bogs isn't the problem, it's the crash that's a problem Sluggish response is much better than a crash...

  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited January 2013

    My system is running a lot smoother & stable since I made the suggested changes! I've slowly added a lot of the quality settings back in with no problems. I kept the disc cache, shortened segment length , lowered render %, lowered bucket size. I also just setup my virtual memory to have pagefiles on all 3 of my drives instead of just 1, maybe that will help if I run out of memory again. I am happy with the results and render speed. Very little post work was done on the attached image. I am excited to try out the new version.

    tiger38.jpg
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    Post edited by Swawa3D on
  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    I've just sent out emails to the beta testers with links to Garibaldi Express beta 12.

    There quite a lot of changes in this one...
    As always make sure you read the changes for this version in the email.

  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited January 2013

    How exciting! Just finishing rendering my last hairstyle with GH11. Is the selection with mask by faces unchecked fixed? Also, Is premade hairstyles with 11 going to update with the disk cache default with 12? I wasnt sure where to activate that.

    And COOL we can export OBJ :cheese:


    Congrats to Swawa, looks wonderful! :)

    Post edited by SpyroRue on
  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    Loving GH Beta 12!

    Really like the new Root Angling randomizer! Really helpful! And I reckon a must for facial hair, body hair and Shorter hairstyles. I also like the added feature that helps prevent curves from going through the characters geometry, the only problem I have is that it can be difficult to control around the ears. (But I did work out that if you use the extrude tool to make it really short, eg -2.50, brush it in a different direction, then extrude it +2.50 It makes it easy to correct the poke through.)

    Heres a hairstyle I just made in GH12.

    With the new Root Angling ability, I'll be refining my previous short hairstyles.

    GHair_Renders_Working_Boy06.png
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  • shaaeliashaaelia Posts: 613
    edited December 1969

    That looks fantastic, Spyro! Looking forward to playing with beta 12 :-)

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    Spyro said:
    Heres a hairstyle I just made in GH12.

    With that hair, it's really noticeable how bad the eyebrows are...they look like someone shaved them off and then drew them on with a pencil .

  • Swawa3DSwawa3D Posts: 231
    edited December 1969

    @ Spyro. Thanks, your short hairstyle is really looking good and realistic. The only thing that really looks off to me is that the front tips look really grayish.

    I can't believe OBJ export was added already! I'm really excited to try that out with Reality if my system can handle it.

  • RAMWolffRAMWolff Posts: 10,146
    edited December 1969

    Quick question. When will the beta cycle be finished up? I have LAMH but I do want this one too so when I do have time to play I can see which plugin will be more appropriate for humans. So far what I've seen from LAMH is the plugin looks awesome on animals but on human models... not sure, might be the shaders need more tweaking or something. I've been so busy catching up since my shoulder injury with life that I've had zero time to explore that one. But I'm continually impressed with the results of this plugin for creating hair for human models. Very much so.

  • MangeyDesignerMangeyDesigner Posts: 129
    edited December 1969

    GH is also awesome on animal fur and now it is exporting to OBJ I think it will end up being the definitive hair solution for DS.
    With its easy to use interface that produces amazing and realistic results for human hair and sensational animal fur it is going to be a must have for me when it comes out.

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