Garibaldi Express: Hair and Fur Plugin Beta [Commercial]

1282931333439

Comments

  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited January 2013

    Disregard this post.

    Post edited by SpyroRue on
  • larsmidnattlarsmidnatt Posts: 4,511
    edited December 1969

    Ok so I've skipped on the last several betas, but I read now that OBJ export is in? But can't have both LAMH and GE installed at same time? GRRRR

    I'll try on a second machine tonight and see how it goes.

  • KeryaKerya Posts: 10,943
    edited March 2013

    There are some that have LAMH and GH installed at the same time and only experience crashes when trying to use both in the same scene ...

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

    It's best you confirm about the two installed at same time on the same computer. I dont think Jader had tried yet with the latest beta.

  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    Ok, So I rattled my head to improve things... I reduced the root width. I didn't use texture eyebrows, but I added a subtle false shadow in the eyebrows place on the face diffuse texture*, the idea is to help blend the skin of the face to the GH eyebrows, and I saw improvement.

    Here is comparison image of the first render (No eyebrows on texture) with The thinner hair roots, higher hair count and False texture shadow.

    *The false shadow on the face texture not only improved the render results, but it also gives reference to the exact location of the brows which aids you when shaping/posing the face of the character in the daz viewport.

    Boy02Brows_4_and_8_Compare.jpg
    1850 x 925 - 752K
  • GoneGone Posts: 833
    edited December 1969

    Since eyebrows seem to be the topic of the day, I thought I would add some of my findings to the discussion.

    The eyebrow was done with a single hair node and is the same one used in all the images here. The distribution map was painted white for the thick part of the brow and 50% grey for the thinner sections. The hair uses the default root/tip settings.

    Eyebrow1 is the one I used on the simple hair style image. Since I knew it was going to be applied on top of an existing texture, I used a hair count of 100 and had the guide hairs raised slightly to give some more depth to the texture.

    With Eyebrow2, I used the surface attract tool to pull the guide hairs flush with the surface and upped the count to 200.

    Both brows have the resample and interpolation settings at 0.2. The rendered hair count for Eyebrow2 is just over 1100 with a vert count of around 5500.

    Eyebrow3 is the same as 2 with the resample and interpolation set back to the default 1. The vert count dropped to around 2200. The difference is subtle but quite noticeable if you flip back and forth between the 2. Aside from a slightly smoother look, the extra vert count appears to add to the shadow depth.

    I created the brow just before beta 12 came out and I didn't use the root angle tool so I'm sure there is plenty of room for improvement here.

    Anyway, I hope someone finds these ramblings helpful.

    Eyebrow3.jpg
    1200 x 1200 - 195K
    Eyebrow2.jpg
    1200 x 1200 - 195K
    Eyebrow1.jpg
    1200 x 1200 - 195K
  • MelanieLMelanieL Posts: 7,131
    edited December 1969

    Spyro said:
    It's best you confirm about the two installed at same time on the same computer. I dont think Jader had tried yet with the latest beta.

    I have Garibaldi Beta 12 installed and also LAMH - I've had a couple of crashes in Garibaldi but I'm not sure whether thay have anything to do with LAMH being there. I have NOT however tried to use both Garibaldi and LAMH at the same time nor in the same session of DS4.5. I'll try to run both later today to see what happens (I'm not on my main machine at present and don't have DS4.5 on my laptop).
  • JuliKJuliK Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    I'm watching this thread for some time now. lol But GH seems so complicated .... Sometimes you seem to speak Greek to me. lol And I'm afraid to install and only have problems with crashes and etc.
    I always prefer to paint all my hairs. I almost never use 3d hair because they are not realistic and when I use them I paint over.

    But GH is very realistic!! And every time I visit this thread and see the wonderful results here ... I'm tempted to try too ... but ... I dunno .. I dont want to reinstall daz Studio for the thousandth time if it give any problem. :P
    It is possible to create long wavy hair? (Greek and medieval style)
    I have a bit of trouble to paint shorthaired male (eg Roman style), but seeing the beautiful results of Spyro´s short hairs... makes me willing to try ....
    I mostly use daz on my laptop (win64)
    But i always like to do tests on my old pc first (win32).

    Sorry my english. :3

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to, for things like eyebrows, to actually take and paint the density maps in a paint program and then import them? You get much finer control of the gradient and blend.

  • MelanieLMelanieL Posts: 7,131
    edited January 2013

    MelanieL said:
    Spyro said:
    It's best you confirm about the two installed at same time on the same computer. I dont think Jader had tried yet with the latest beta.

    I have Garibaldi Beta 12 installed and also LAMH - I've had a couple of crashes in Garibaldi but I'm not sure whether thay have anything to do with LAMH being there. I have NOT however tried to use both Garibaldi and LAMH at the same time nor in the same session of DS4.5. I'll try to run both later today to see what happens (I'm not on my main machine at present and don't have DS4.5 on my laptop).
    OK, so I had a little play with Garibaldi and LAMH.
    I have both plugins installed (LAMH as purchased at DAZ3D and Beta 12 of Garibaldi) on DS4.5.1.6 (64-bit)
    I can create, edit and render a Garibaldi hair without any problems on its own in a scene.
    I can create, edit and render a LAMH hair without any problems on its own in a scene.
    I only get any problems if I try to use both plugins at the same time.
    If I create a LAMH hair first then try to create a Garibaldi one, I find that Paint doesn't work properly - the first brush-stroke seems to be OK, but then only tiny patches can be painted, giving the resulting hair a terrible mangy look.
    If I create a Garibaldi hair first, then LAMH will apparently only add hair to the SAME figure. Not too bad if creating head hair in one plugin and a beard (say) in the other, but not much use for adding one hair to one character and the other to another character! The scene will then render OK, and I can get back into LAMH to adjust the hair it created BUT if I try to go back into Garibaldi to edit that hair then I hit the Paint problem and if I try to change some of the display settings I crash.
    So it seems that the two pugins can both be installed, but only one can be used in any DS4.5 session.
    ETA: I just realised that I only tried this with two Genesis figures - not sure whether the same problem will occur if using Garibaldi on a human and LAMH on an animal, for example - must try this next.
    Post edited by MelanieL on
  • Design Anvil - Razor42Design Anvil - Razor42 Posts: 1,234
    edited January 2013

    Had a bit of a play with GE B12 this morning and tested the export obj function.

    Not sure if this has been covered already.

    I tried importing the exported hair to Blender and making some minor sculpting changes to create a morph.

    Then exported as an object to use as a morph target.

    And to my surprise the Morph was accepted into Daz on the imported obj hair.
    I guess there's no reason it wouldn't work but for some reason I was pleasantly surprised that it worked well.

    And the really cool thing is you can animate the morph over time!

    I have only done a proof of concept test so far but it seem to work and needs more experimentation.

    EDIT: Tried it after using transfer utility and still OK

    Post edited by Design Anvil - Razor42 on
  • JaderailJaderail Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    I'm thinking that my Crash issues was NOT both pluggins installed but the fact I had so many OLD Genesis files installed. I'm not sure but now with LAMH and GB 12 both installed I can work just fine. I'm not going to push my luck and try both in one render. That might be more than I can hope for, BUT it would be great if both DID get along so that was not a possible issue.

  • GoneGone Posts: 833
    edited December 1969

    Your species behaviour is illogical - but strangely fascinating.

    -------------------------------------------
    @MJC1016
    I can't speak for anyone else, but that is how I make my eyebrow maps.

    --------------------------------------------
    BUG ALERT
    It seems that, if you try to change the resample curves value, you MUST do it from the style workspace the first time or the program crashes. After the first change, you can make changes to the value from any workspace without problems.

    Vulcan_Brow.jpg
    1200 x 1800 - 423K
  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    mjc1016 said:
    I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to, for things like eyebrows, to actually take and paint the density maps in a paint program and then import them? You get much finer control of the gradient and blend.

    I do exactly that. In Photoshop. It's very accurate :)

  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    With Eyebrow2, I used the surface attract tool to pull the guide hairs flush with the surface and upped the count to 200.

    Both brows have the resample and interpolation settings at 0.2. The rendered hair count for Eyebrow2 is just over 1100 with a vert count of around 5500.

    Interesting findings here! The extra vert count and resampling really makes a difference, the brows actually have depth about them.

    My latest attempts have lowered root widths a high hair count like 480/500 with interpolation widths at 56. I didn't try resampleing.

    Heres My recent improved Spyro's brows :)

    GHair_Renders_Working_SpyroV6_Eyebrow_8.png
    925 x 925 - 915K
  • GoneGone Posts: 833
    edited December 1969

    Looking sharp!

    Pretty soon we're going to be complaining that the characters don't look as good as the hair they are wearing. :lol:

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    Gone said:
    Looking sharp!

    Pretty soon we're going to be complaining that the characters don't look as good as the hair they are wearing. :lol:

    Well...there's quite a few texture sets that would fall under that heading...

  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    Gone said:
    Looking sharp!

    Pretty soon we're going to be complaining that the characters don't look as good as the hair they are wearing. :lol:

    Oh yes! I've been upgrading my custom shaders and textures... Im more careful about what I buy now too lol

  • MangeyDesignerMangeyDesigner Posts: 129
    edited December 1969

    Eyebrows are so difficult to get looking right... lots more work playing with them for me I think.

    here is my first effort

    GHElf02a.jpg
    1393 x 1970 - 211K
  • KeryaKerya Posts: 10,943
    edited December 1969

    She looks lovely. I think a bit less density ... The form looks right to me.

  • futurebiscuitfuturebiscuit Posts: 0
    edited January 2013

    Spyro said:
    Is the selection with mask by faces unchecked fixed?
    No, didn't get time to look at that one in detail, but it's a priority for the next beta release.

    Spyro said:
    Also, Is premade hairstyles with 11 going to update with the disk cache default with 12? I wasnt sure where to activate that.
    So hair styles made since Disk Cache rendering mode was introduced (beta 6) will not be automatically updated to use it. Any older hair styles, like the simple included examples will be set to use the Disk Cache rendering mode.
    The setting between rendering modes is located in the Rendering->General Garibaldi nodes Parameters properties in the daz interface.

    Spyro said:
    Really like the new Root Angling randomizer!
    Was a small feature I was planning to add in v1.1 (and the reduce deformer) but I decided to bring it forward as I felt they've not been many visible new features for a while and things were getting a bit boring.

    Swawa said:
    I can't believe OBJ export was added already!
    It's a pretty minor feature to write. I've had mixed feeling about adding it. Basically I was just fed up of people bugging me about it.

    RAMWolff said:
    Quick question. When will the beta cycle be finished up?
    Basically as soon as I'm happy that the existing feature set is stable and robust enough and a complete set of detailed and accessible range of documentation is available.

    MelanieL said:
    ...had a couple of crashes. Should there be a log file somewhere to see what went wrong?
    So if a daz shows a info dialog box when a crash happens you should be able to save a crash dump file.
    If you have the .zip crash dump then attach it to a email (reply to the beta links email or the email address on the Gariabldi website) and write a brief explanation of what tool/operation you were undertaking when the crash happened, even one or two sentences can be very useful.
    If you don't get the daz crash dialog but something crashes or doesn't work as expected then a quick email explaining the issue and what actions caused it is also very useful.

    I've run into a problem...I created a mesh, ... I end up with almost 200,000 hairs...or about 700 hairs/sq inch (not the entire mesh is covered with hair)...did I make the mesh 'too' finely divided? Is there a practical limit when it comes to the mesh?


    So the distubution amount is how many follicles are placed per square centimetre, the amount a mesh is divided shouldn't make much difference (apart from the amount of style cures), it's all based on the geometries surface area. The scale of your model in your scene is the defining influence, is it a similar size to a standard character. If you feel there still something is not right it would be great it you could email me the model and I will have a closer look.

    I'm watching this thread for some time now. lol But GH seems so complicated


    Yes, creating realistic hair from scratch can be daunting if you haven't done something similar before. Garibaldi Express v1 will be just the start of a vision of a accessible hair system I've been wanting to make for a few years.
    With Garibaldi Express we want to cater to people who just want to click in the daz content browser to load and render an existing hair style to people who want to customise existing styles and content creators who want powerful tools to create hair styles from scratch.
    As the current version of the software stabilises the main focus will become documentation that should open the product to a larger range of users.

    I'm afraid to install and only have problems with crashes and etc.


    So of the large amount of people who download each beta the feedback about issues sent to me is relatively low (especially with the later versions). But as with all beta test software... if you expect a complete, issue free product I would advise you to wait for the final release.

    It is possible to create long wavy hair? (Greek and medieval style)
    Yes, no reason why not. The amount and detail of the hair is dependant on your computers resources, but Garibaldi is targeting to work on 2GB 32bit machines, the included examples as of beta 12 render fine on such systems.

    OK, so I had a little play with Garibaldi and LAMH.
    I don't know why this would not work. If you get a crash dump it would be great to send it to me, I might be able to work what LAMH is doing to the Daz scene that Garibaldi can't deal with.
    I can't say I've installed LAMH or plan to, I imagine as with most software EULA it probably has clauses that restrict me looking into it. I believe there some feature overlap between these products that might see my use of it questionable.
    Anyway, as I've stated before I have a defined plan of where Garibaldi will be moving in the future and LAMH does not really concern me.
    LAMH seems a great bit of software for what it does. I don't feel any need for me to comment on it. This forum thread is about Garibaldi Express beta testing.

    It seems that, if you try to change the resample curves value, you MUST do it from the style workspace the first time or the program crashes.
    With the next beta version I plan to move the style curve resampling from the edit menu to an interactive style workspace tool. It's current positioning is not very accessible and maybe implies it's not as important as it is. Should also fix this issue.

    Post edited by futurebiscuit on
  • larsmidnattlarsmidnatt Posts: 4,511
    edited December 1969

    MelanieL said:
    MelanieL said:
    Spyro said:
    It's best you confirm about the two installed at same time on the same computer. I dont think Jader had tried yet with the latest beta.

    I have Garibaldi Beta 12 installed and also LAMH - I've had a couple of crashes in Garibaldi but I'm not sure whether thay have anything to do with LAMH being there. I have NOT however tried to use both Garibaldi and LAMH at the same time nor in the same session of DS4.5. I'll try to run both later today to see what happens (I'm not on my main machine at present and don't have DS4.5 on my laptop).

    OK, so I had a little play with Garibaldi and LAMH.
    I have both plugins installed (LAMH as purchased at DAZ3D and Beta 12 of Garibaldi) on DS4.5.1.6 (64-bit)
    I can create, edit and render a Garibaldi hair without any problems on its own in a scene.
    I can create, edit and render a LAMH hair without any problems on its own in a scene.
    I only get any problems if I try to use both plugins at the same time.
    If I create a LAMH hair first then try to create a Garibaldi one, I find that Paint doesn't work properly - the first brush-stroke seems to be OK, but then only tiny patches can be painted, giving the resulting hair a terrible mangy look.
    If I create a Garibaldi hair first, then LAMH will apparently only add hair to the SAME figure. Not too bad if creating head hair in one plugin and a beard (say) in the other, but not much use for adding one hair to one character and the other to another character! The scene will then render OK, and I can get back into LAMH to adjust the hair it created BUT if I try to go back into Garibaldi to edit that hair then I hit the Paint problem and if I try to change some of the display settings I crash.
    So it seems that the two pugins can both be installed, but only one can be used in any DS4.5 session.
    ETA: I just realised that I only tried this with two Genesis figures - not sure whether the same problem will occur if using Garibaldi on a human and LAMH on an animal, for example - must try this next.

    Thanks for all that info, now I;'m less scared!

  • foleyprofoleypro Posts: 455
    edited December 1969

    Pinup 2...

    Playing with the shader and Light and shadow...tried to save new scene and DS4.5 crashed to desktop...Still have original scene...

    Pinup_3.jpg
    1024 x 1024 - 628K
  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    Nice work foley! I like the light passing through the hair. Very interesting :) The translucency/SSS is very effective in that shot.

  • GoneGone Posts: 833
    edited December 1969

    No new hair here - just a boring story.

    Both the hair and eyebrows (yes, I know they are not normal but that was the point :-)) are saved as wearable presets. I fired up DS and spent a lazy 10 minutes setting up the scene. Loaded a default Genesis, spun up a character, loaded textures, pose, clothes, lighting..... and the hair and eyebrows - just like any other prop.

    Since I intended to use them with their default settings I didn't even bother to open Garibaldi - just hit render.

    And that's how easy it can be.

    BobCut.jpg
    1200 x 1200 - 337K
  • SpyroRueSpyroRue Posts: 5,020
    edited December 1969

    Well done man! I need to give wearable assets a go soon. Ive never saved anything as such before.

  • DaremoK3DaremoK3 Posts: 798
    edited December 1969

    Gone:

    "And that's how easy it can be."


    How, pray-tell, does one get to the "And that's how easy it can be" stage?

    I tried creating a wearable asset following all info offered in the entirety of this thread (a simple Goatee for males). I was successful in saving such an asset, it can load onto a new Genesis figure, it is assigned to the new Genesis figure, is editable in the editor, and even follows movement.

    However, it refuses to render. I think I might be missing a critical step in the saving process.

    Could you, please, detail your saving work-flow to create a working preset.


    Note: My last test with this was in DSPro 4.5.0.114 using Garibaldi beta 10. I've moved up to DS ~ .1.56, and Garibaldi beta 12, and would like to try again hoping it was previously unattainable with the earlier setup.

  • JuliKJuliK Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    @futurebiscuit: Thank you for the reply! :)
    I'll keep watching the thread and I might try GH in my old pc. *crossing fingers*

  • foleyprofoleypro Posts: 455
    edited December 1969

    Same scene Longer Hair tweaks on Hair shader and lighting...Saved as scene fine now

    PinupG4_BU.jpg
    1024 x 1024 - 723K
  • Eustace ScrubbEustace Scrubb Posts: 2,687
    edited December 1969

    Our generous and intrepid FutureBiscuit commented about the lack of feedback relative to the download numbers: I for my part haven't even gotten G-Ex open since um, Beta 6 or so. It's been busy, with Christmas, a wife and toddlers!

This discussion has been closed.