Best Programs to Make Hair
missuskisses
Posts: 918
in The Commons
Couldn't find any recent discussions on the forum. Wondering what third-party programs are great for making human hair and hairstyles for use with Genesis 3/8 figures? Thanks all.
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I've seen it done in zBrush.
Zbrush fibermesh is probably the easiest to go, with the GOZ easy to transfer as well :)
The latest Blacksmith3D Pro 7 has tools for creating and editing hair but I have no experience with it.
Depends on the type of hair you mean; traditional methods that Daz still uses (15 years now?), can be done in any modelling package; the best might be the one you're familiar with.
But you may mean fibremesh or some sort of strand based hair which Studio may not support.
Pick your favourite 3D package and look for tutorials on it.
OOT is (imo) the best at the hair popular in Studio, even theirs has issues; not their fault, but the fault of the type of product it is.
Expensive of resources, especially for longer hair I expect?
Thanks for all the suggestions!! Will continue to check in if others have more suggestions.
I do like the OOT hair the best, and would want to eventually create something as nice as those.
I've tried using Blacksmith3D for other things during their trial, but I wasn't a huge fan and didn't try the hair tools. I admit I probably didn't give the program enough time. If someone can vouch for using B3D for hair, I would certainly give that another try.
Will check out ZBrush. Was looking in Pluralsight, and not a lot of tutorials for hair. There is one for Zbrush that looked like it had potential, though it was created back in 2012.
J. Cade of these forums uses Blender to create hair and there is no shortage of tutorials on YouTube on hair to create hair in Blender.
Thanks; will check those out as well!
Here is a demo of hair creating in Blacksmith3D Pro 7.
Has anybody succeded with making the hair with that tool, yet?
Yep - the problem in a nutshell. Traditional ribbon based hair is so unrealistic but realistic looking fibre hair such as (the excellent) products from RedzStudio will slow posing in the viewport to an annoying degree because of the huge number of polygons added to the scene.
Yeah, very huge resource consumption - that's why there aren't many out there, but if you do it well it is one of the most realistic hairs you can get :D
i would assume hair could be made using Carrara or Hexagon? Often sold here extremely inexpensively. I bought Carrara for $12 not long ago, and Hexagon was free at one time. Hex is $14 now.
Carrara 8.5 is $100 right now, but there are specials quite often.
I'd love to try a long one; I'm still strugling with LAMH, for some reason I just can't get to grips with it; then again, I want to use it will G3 well G8 without jumping through hoops.
I have been wanting to try my hand at hair myself but can never find straight forward amswers. Everyone always going off on one thing or another and never sticking to the main quest of "HOW DO YOU CREATE HAIR" if there are different ways then please elaborate on the different ways not just start talking about how many several ways there are and what it takes to do each one or a certain type of one. Just explain how about going about it. I mean I can't even find any decent tutorials on it. it's so strange. I can't even find out how to get a skull cap or if you have to make one, hoe do you make one?
Everytime the question is asked, "How do you create hair?" or "How do you make hair for a model?" etc, It's always the same reply... Well that depends on the type of hair you are wanting to make. And as soon as the person answers if they are even close enough to know what type of hair it is they want then conversation always goes on how difficult it is or what program is best or worse but never doesnt anyone every get to explaiing the steps of starting the process of creating the hair... ARE THERE ANY TUTORIALS out there that really shows you or explains the process of creqting hair. Sorry for any typos. And have a good day...
There are quite a few elaborate tutorials on YouTube for creating hair in Blender but I have yet to see really good tutorials on how to make a good elaborate hair style in LAMH.
I feel your pain. This forum seems unwilling to help anyone LEARN how to do things only comment as you outlined. What is up with that? ..A Simple question cannot get a simple answer here.
I want to know how to create hair too, but no one here seems to want or be able to state how to get started, it seems everyone that replies assumes the questioner has vast experience and knowledge which seems so silly given that we are asking the question, "HOW...?"
I still continue to look here but it is a fustrating experience.
Thanks.
If you want tutorials then Lady Littlefox has a good series for polygon hair https://www.daz3d.com/modeling-with-littlefox-hair-collection
Please remember that the forums are for use by forum members, ie people like yourself. They are not staffed by vemdors or technical people per se, simple used by other member who offer help when they can.
Philemo has made a plugin for Carrara to create mesh from Carrara dynamic hair and the dynamic poses or brushing it actually saves as morphloader compatible obj exports too, it creates strips of hair a selectable width that can be transmapped.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/carrara-time-savers/
Yes this is a pet peeve of mine, and in the interest of not peeving myself, let me just state that hair is one of those things when it comes to DAZ which isn't mature. What do I mean by that? I mean that hair by it's very nature is complicated. As stated above, to make really GOOD hair takes a lot of work and the vertex count (poly count for those of you who are DAZ based) is extremely high. There really isn't any getting around this. You are face with either making ribbon type hair, for which you have to come up with a killer texture to hide it's nature, or you have to spend a lot of time in a modeller creating finer hair, whose poly count is going to dog your DAZ when it comes to posing.
So if you want to make hair and are looking for an off-the-shelf solution, you're in for a long and frustrating hunt. The best solution, IMO, is to simply put the hours in with Blender, ZBrush, Maya, etc and find something that works for YOU.
I'm sorry that this isn't the answer you're looking for but perhaps you can take comfort in the thought that none of us get the answer we're looking for with these more difficult questions in DAZ.
LOL, I have already used the Whiskers product on G3M (fibermesh beard), Redz Oh My Body Hair, Oh My Lashes and Oh My Brows, as well as some of (I think her) head hair and had narry a slowdown ;). I do have 16 gigs of ram on this machine and I suppose folks with less would have a harder time of it I guess.
As for hair, there are already many suggestions for fibermesh hair. And, you can even make hair in Hexagon. Valea used to have a good tutorial on how to make traditional transmapped hair in Hexagon on the PoserPro forums, but I don't know what ever became of it :( Was very good - she makes a shape and uvmaps it first BEFORE shaping it on the head.
Laurie
In another thread WandW told about a link to Wayback Machine to Valea's tutorial:
http://web.archive.org/web/20081010061457/http://www.art-collaborations.com/Valea_HexHair.pdf
Yes, I'm aware that some users say that their posing doesn't slow with fibre hair but I'd really love to know how to avoid the sluggishness. I have 32 Gigs RAM and a decent i7 CPU and fibre hair kills my posing. Even with one character and one hairstyle. Judging by the other comments here and in other threads, I'm not the only one.
Indeed this is the area where Daz Studio/Genesis remains Stuck
in the late 1990's/early 2000's.
Dforce was a major leap forward in clothing realism
(even though the lack of cloth thickness is a major shortcoming)
The skins/joints look excellent,
IMHO a new hair system needs to be the next major breakthrough for you DS users who Dont have access to other environments for final renders.
WHile there are some really notable ribbon/transmapped hairs by
artists such as AprilYSH and Aeon Soul ,They all fail under certain light conditions partcularly if you try to rim light them as seen here.
And for us animated filmmakers ALL Daz long hairs are essentially useless as you cannot get them to move naturally with the head .
Thankfully , if I really need a long haired figure in my animations, I have C4D's Dynamic Spline base hair system with its many styling options.
Very much agree on the cloth thickness; there are about 15 dforce items I passed on as it was too obvious; when it's just the hem of the skirt, I'll consider it, but what kills it for me is the perfectly smooth/stright lines coupled with no depth.
The swimsuit in the image has depth - but still has issues.
I would also like to add that the https://www.daz3d.com/classic-long-hair-with-dforce-for-genesis-8-females is brilliant - easily the most realistic hair yet; not perfect, but brilliant. I'm playing with a different shader in the image - too much blond when direct light hits it. And yes for highlights, when I need them on hair, I had to create myself a fix; think I actually used in in an image in my gallery - but my renders rarely satisfy me enough to see the light-of-day - beyond the occasional use in the forums to illustrate a point.
Ok, so here's a really stupid question to throw out at you all... I've heard some say that hair slows them down and such, and then discussions of System Ram and CPU's... Don't you guys throw it over to your GPU and let it do the work it's designed to do? I have tried my renders with three different set-ups... CPU only, CPU + GPU, and GPU only. The one with both, was deplorable. The one with CPU only was better, but still kinda Meh! Then I went to GPU only, and WOW. My render times improved massively. Using the exact same saved scene, the times went from 2 hours (both cpu + gpu) to 1 hour 15 minutes (cpu only) to 38 minutes (gpu only). and I restarted daz between each test, after setting the new config when I switched.
In case you're wondering, I use a AMD FX-8350 at 4ghz, with 16gbs of DDR3 and a GTX-750 Ti with 4gb of GDDR5 on it.