Fibermesh - what is that?
daveso
Posts: 7,802
in The Commons
i see stuff using fibermesh. what is that exactly?
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A technology that allows people to model hairs as individual strands, or something close to it. Theoretically better for realism (although some of the PAs who use seem to have trouble getting the hairlines to look convincing) but requiring more computing power to render.
One benefit is that fiberhair for Hair doesn't require transparency maps, which can cause problems in several instances.
Fibremesh needs more memory, but if you have that memory it should render a lot faster than "normal" hair, due to lack of transparency maps, as Will says above.
Yeah, if your computer can get it to load and fit, it shouldn't take forever to render. Transmaped anything loads just fine, but can slow a render to a crawl (trees, anyone?).
I've an old M3 hair that I used for years, but even on a modern system it could tyake up to an hour just to render that wig. Back in DS3 with the 32-bit limit leaving it to render overnight was about as good as it got.
Isn't long render times for some types of hair only a problem with 3DL? I haven't noticed similar differences in Iray.
Iray is definitely faster than 3DL for transmapped hair, but is even faster with fibermesh.
The biggest problem for me with Fibermesh hair is that it slows down movement in the viewport. Using the sliders to change pose or move the character slows to a crawl because of the huge number of polygons. Hiding (making invisible with the little eye icon) does not help. If anyone knows a workaround, I'd use Fibermesh hair all the time - especially the RedzStudio products.
By the way, I don't use the IRay preview in the viewport - that combined with fibermesh absolutely kills viewport movement.
i try to leave the hair off until just before ready to render ...
+1 This is what I do. A lot of the newer hairs can really slow things down. By hiding the hair (the little eye in the Scene Tab) it can really help me set up my scenes faster. Sometimes really detailed clothing can slow things down as well, in that case, I will hide that clothing too until everything else is set up and I'm about ready to render.
Lately, I've even just waited until the last steps to even load the clothing and the hair onto the scene and just set everything else up first.
I'm a little biased on the subject, buuuut...
This is *really* surprising to me. I use/work with fibermesh a lot, and hiding it should speed up your viewport. I'm wondering if maybe you have some high poly clothing or sets in there as well?
Worth mentioning that fibermesh is just a term coming out of ZBrush. It's like any old polygon just lots of them. Lots of tiny little hair cards or tubes. Hence the slow down in the viewport, this can quickly go into the hundreds of thousands of polys. If it's been converted to subd this will run into millions.
And I'm not sure at which point one has problems with them according to their machine specs: I have 16 gigs of ram and a late model Intel quad and I never have any trouble with any Redz hair, body hair, eyelashes, brows and any other combo. The only time my computer slows down at all is when I have an animal in the scene with LAMH fiber hair. Then I have to change the preview to Hidden line or I won't be going anywhere. LOL However, there are no head hair or bodyhair props than even give a hiccup.
Laurie
Well colour me amazed! I have a pretty beefy i7 with 32 GB of RAM and my viewport slows down considerably when using any high-poly hair. The lag between dragging the slider and actual movement of a limb or rotation of a figure wearing the hair is frustrating. That is true also for smaller body-hair additions though it is all relative to the polygon count. As I said earlier, using fibre hair and the IRay preview together is practically impossible (and yes, I do have an NVidia GPU so rendering is not the issue).
@ChangelingChick : I think you are mistaken about hiding. I've had this conversation a number of times and have always been told that hiding the hair does not speed up the posing. That is also my experience.
hmm .. i have some eyebrows that dont seem to slow down much ... i do not have an nvidia card at all ... i only use texture shaded for preview ... iray stalls everything
Brows will have very few fibres compared to a hairstyle or even body hair. As a rule, from what I experience, the more fibres the more polygons the slower the movement in the viewport. But I'm talking about actual posing movement, not camera movement. Posing of the figure wearing the hair.
Yeah I've had three of Redz' hair styles, eyebrows, and a couple beards all in the same scene and not had any signifigant problems, slight slow down on the viewport manupulation but not to the point where it annoyed me.. 16 gig of memory and a 7 year old computer.
Having it in the scene, hidden or not, will slow down any action that requires recalculating the position of all those polygons, which is why posing is still affected. Only if it's visible, it will slow down anything that requires redrawing all those polygons, which is why hiding helps with scene navigation/camera movement.
Agreed. I don't have a problem with camera movement - only slow posing.
No problem with ANY Redz hair either (16 gb RAM, GeForce 940M). It's smoothing that slows me down.
In that case, I'd suggest either waiting until the figure is posed before adding the hair, or unfitting it while you're posing. (That way, it only has to recalculate twice (on unfit and refit), rather than every time you make any change.)
I use smoothing on all characters - and HD when I have it and no problems with slow-downs. But the fibre hair does slow posing. I'm starting to think that it is somewhat subjective. Maybe I notice it more than others but I do find it troublesome.
I make fibermesh, and this was something I experimented with a little in the process of making my beard. I noticed that when I had the wizard morph out full length, it would definitely slow down in preview (and rendering), but even just having a morph to shorten all the hair sped things up considerably in both. I'm curious if there's a specific hair you've had trouble with?
I think you quoted me, not AllenArt, but no, it is not specific to a certain hair. As I said earlier - the more polygons the slower the movement. That would make sense with your longer and shorter hair, I guess, but that is not hiding in the sense that I meant. I meant using the little visibility eye to make it invisible (hidden). That makes no difference to the posing lag.
What's happening is there is fibremesh eyebrows & such now & DS is doing things like 'rebuilding' the geometry if one so much as touches a bone on a character with fibre mesh. I just dropped 2 of 3 fiddlers in my Old King Cole render because DS was rendering over 40 minutes andhadn't even managed to write to canvas. If you was CPU rendering rebuilding that geometry is ultra slow and not really needed unless one is actually redrawing the fibre mesh hair.
Yeah, delete lines and the formatting goes wonky :D Making the hair shorter or longer doesn't change the polycount though, and I'm sorry I wasn't clear. I experimented using the visibility and with shaping morphs with the same results-- the less that was visible, the less slowdown, no matter the method. That's why I was surprised it didn't help at all.
Then I'm at a loss to explain it. Hiding the hair while posing was the first thing I tried and it made no difference. Since then I've seen it discussed and I always get the same impression - it makes no difference. Even some of the others in this thread seem to confirm that. I'm still not sure we are talking about the same method of hiding - that is, using the little eye icon in the Scene Pane to make it invisible. If you have a different method of hiding, please explain because I don't know of another way unless I play with the opacity in the Surfaces Pane (which also made no difference for me).
I just tested on my machine using the short afro hair (https://www.daz3d.com/short-afro-hair-for-genesis-3-and-8). With just a single G8F figure and the hair, I get no lag whatsoever in the viewport as I spin the camera around. Same if I adjust the pose and/or shape of the character, again no delay. Even using Iray preview mode I can still spin the camera without issues.
I have an i7 processor and 32GB of RAM, Windows 10, so similar box to you marble.
Decimator tells me the short afro hair has 2 million polygons, so a pretty resource heavy fibermesh hair.
I noticed the Afro hair has smoothing switched on. This did not cause any delays for me, but you could try and switch smoothing off any fibermesh hair until render time, to see if this helps with your viewport lag.
Just to be clear - I was not talking about lag with camera movement. No problems at all with swinging the cameras around. It is the figure movement using the parameter dials ... rotate, move left or right, etc. Or pose changes such as moving a limb. If I type in a number (say, -30) into the Y-Axis then that will happen instantly but if I try to drag the figure down by that amount there is a lag. Remove the hair and all is well again. Only fibre hair and not specific hair - any fibre hair. The more hair the more the lag. Eyebrows are fine but body hair in clumps - somewhat slow. A full head of hair, even slower. Both head and body hair, slower still.
It is late here now but I'll have a look tomorrow to see if smoothing is on. I don't recall ever turning on smoothing for fibre hair.
As a matter of interest - what are your OpenGL viewport settings? Perhaps I have mine set to something unrealistic?
Yes I was moving limbs without any lag.
OpenGL:
Per Pixel Shading: Off
Hardware Anti-Aliasing: On
Display Optimization: Best
I think the last setting is the most important for avoiding lag.
Edit: Some products turn smoothing on by default.