Makeup, Eyebrows, and Pubic Hair -- Oh, My!
Timotheus
Posts: 249
So for character creation, what are the approaches people have used for offering multiple options for things like makeup, warpaint, eyebrows, etc.?
I am aware of at least these: 1) diffuse layer overlays; 2) LIE presets; 3) Iray decals; and 4) geometry shells. Unfortunately, all of these seem to have various pros and cons, and there seems to be no definitive "go-to" method. I suppose difuse layer overlays might be the closest, as I think its biggest shortcoming is no preview in the viewport. I like the idea of the geometry shell, especially for eyebrows and pubic hair, because it supports bumps and displacements. But it seems there is concern about the overhead for supporting the extra geometry.
I hope some of the content creators out here are willing to discuss their approaches and maybe even give tips. 
Any thoughts?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
fibermesh for eyebrows and gen hair.
the brows you can get here, the gen hair you will have to get over at render -otica or -osity I think. there is also at least one product that has all body hairs, chest, pits, gens, etc. Oh my...
I'm a fan of fibermesh myself (surprise surprise) :D In fact, the whole reason I started the lines of fibermesh hair is because I really dislike painted facial and body hair and was making a character for sale. Are you looking at making a character to sell or for your own use? Makes a huge difference in the suggestions you'll get :D In the last character I put up for sale, I used diffuse overlay for makeup and fibermesh for body hair. In the prop set I made for him, I have geoshells with effects on (as well as props). The character I did with warpaint, I used LIE presets. Other characters I've done, I just made different texture sets. It really depends what you're doing, what your goals are, and what methods you understand/like best. I don't think any 2 vendors use the exact same methods or workflow.
try Laticis Imagery on DeviantArt
I left out fibermesh hair. That's actually what I switched to for the eyebrows that I originally did with a geoshell, although, ironically, the overhead is even greater, right? But you really can't beat the results.
Tim
Those aren't redistributable.
With fibermesh you generally don't have image maps on them for the materials, and that helps a LOT. And the ones you do can be really small.
I thought the OP was just asking for examples of what people do not for redistributing
For the purposes of this discussion, I'm interested in techniques and examples in general. Ultimately, I hope to apply what I learn to commercial products, so it's good to remain aware of the licensing involved in any of these examples.
Thanks so much for your input on this!
One can never have too many body hair options, as you don't want two people in the same scene to have identical arm hair or... whatever. :) Fortunately, there's a lot of good stuff out there, but unfortunately, there are also some really bad ones, and some of the poorest come from vendors that are otherwise reliable. For body hair, I've yet to see a LIE or other image only solution that was useful for anything except when you need somthing that will show through a layer of clothing or an extreme long shot. On the other hand, depending on the figure you use, there are actually several free fibermesh gen hair props that are of extremely high quality. Lactis's freebies gallery at DeviantArt has some excellent ones ones for G3F, G3M and G2F, as well as some nice eyebrow and beard sets.
For G8M, it's hard to beat the all in one starter solution of Deepsea's https://www.daz3d.com/hair-set-for-genesis-8-male-s Deeps. The full body hair suits by Exnem at Renderosity for G3F, G8F and V4 are also generally good as far as the hair placement, though there's some distortion on the underarm hair and the included Iray shaders aren't particularly good so so you're much better off using one of Sloshworks' various hair shader options, PhilW's https://www.daz3d.com/hair-lustre-shaders-for-iray ; or the fibermesh shaders that come with Mec4D's https://www.daz3d.com/mec4d-unshaven-2-for-genesis-2-male-s . There are also a number of products that come with beard/gen hairs that can easily be refit to other characters such as https://www.daz3d.com/george-hair-set and most of the hair/beard/pubes that come with RedzStudio figures. And for pubic hair, the most reliable and versatile "lower" body hair solutions I've found come from a vendor at Renderotica, MIke1954. Besides supporting a wide variety of the 2nd party gens as well as DAZ's gens, his product's best feature is that it comes with both a huge selection of shaping morphs as well as the ability to trim the hair into any shape desired via a single opacity map.
Finally, one trick to remember with Fibermesh is that most of it is proportionately much thicker than a real hair is to a real human, so besides looking a bit thick it tends to cast more of a shadow than real hair does. To get aroung that, I've found that simply dialing down the opacity on the hair tends to make it read much more naturally to the eyes, as it softens the shadows and makes the hard edges become less distinct.
Thanks for all the great info!
I probably should not have lumped all of this together, as there really are two distinct categories: 1) character options that have volume, geometry, such as all forms of facial and body heair; and 2) character options that really are just applied to the skin such as makeup, facepaint, tattoos, etc.
For the first, if it has geometry in the real world, it should have geometry in the digital world. Makes sense.
What about techniques for the flat stuff?
I won't be offended that my facial and body hair products here didn't make CyberSox's list :P
For flat stuff, in general, diffuse overlay is the preferred option. You don't get an iray preview, and you need to kind of get used to how it works, but once you do, it gives you the most diversity with the least additional maps so it keeps the complete package size down.
These are my favorites, they look very natural and pick up the light and backlighting beautifully:
https://www.daz3d.com/cc-shave-this--body-hair-for-genesis-8-males
https://www.daz3d.com/cc-foster-for-genesis-8-male
And I have all three and they're great. :) I think I got side tracked off the G8M products in general because, to be honest, I still find myself using G3M and G2M over G8M except for older characters.
The eyebrows and other body hair on all the main Daz genesis models should all be a special seperate geoshell. I also believe that underwear for the genesis line should be geoshells as well>> so we don't see any pokethru. It would be great if there was a geoshell that was just there to push the clothes away from the core model that way we would not see poke thru.
~just an idea
I didn't mind the flat stuff in the days of V4 and Genesis 1, but now that the skin textures and renderers have become so photrealistic, I find that 2D solutions for anything beyond well trimmed eyebrows tend to require a bit of re-painting in post to take the curse off what is obviously flat-hair curving unnaturally around body and facial curves. With that in mind, the geo-shell option is probably the least bothersome as one can at least push the shell out a bit to make the hairs appear to project out more from the body. Something that I do a lot now, though, is a hybrid approach when using skins that have hair painted on and no clean option. In those cases I add a small bit of fibermesh tinted to match in key spots so that at least there's something sticking out and catching the light/casting shadows.
ChangelingChick's fibermesh is the best I've used thus far for the body hair, and I own all the products so far available for men.
I had honestly thought the geoshell was the next-best thing to actual fibermesh hair. For example, I used it for eyebrows with a healthy displacement and got just a bit of that "sticking out" look. And I thought it would be very lightweight, since I was just using a simple alpha map with the opacity to just show the hair. Then I could use all the normal channels to color the hair, no image maps. I only questioned it beacuse a tester questioned it.
Another follow-up on the geometry shell in particular: I started a new discussion under Technical Help to talk about the overhead (https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/267991/geometry-shell-overhead), since it's more of a technical issue.
Tim
I love fibermesh hair. Really painted on brows do not compare, imo. Though, it depends on the quality of the brows. A good artist can make even painted on brows look amazing and a bad artist can make fibermesh brows look like poo. lol But all things, like quality, being equal I prefer the fibermesh brows over the baked in ones. You can change the colors of fibermesh brows to your exact desired color and they often work with iray hair shaders. And they generally look better in close-ups than painted brows.
As for makeup I prefer Diffuse Overlay - as the load time for L.I.E. makeup drives me batty. I like to flip through certain looks pretty quickly to see which ones I like the best and the load time for L.I.E. makeup is a bit prohibitive, imo. Also setting up presets for L.I.E. Makeup can be pretty tricky and, if what I was told is true, requires a bit of coding. While Diffuse Overlay makeup is pretty easy to set up presets for, imo. And Diffuse Overlay makeup (when set up properly) can be used on other characters too - so that's a bonus for the customer over makeup that is baked onto the texture maps.
Sometimes geometry shells don't play so well with dForce (at least it didn't at first, I'm not sure if the new versions of Daz have improved the interaction of geoshells and dForce nor not) - and dForce is getting more and more popular so, personally, I wouldn't go with geoshells. That's, again, just a personal preference. :)
If you use fibrehair eyebrows, moreso with guys the gals models, because of the bigger varience in fellow's browridges it can be quite a challenge to get both the brow shape you want and to get that brow shape actually laying correctly completely flat on the surface of the browridge.
I like fibre hair better too for rendering it's just that long styles for gals are non-existant. The recent 1700th Century hair from RedzStudio is the best long fibre hair for men & women that I've seen not that I've been able to afford it yet.
I was not aware of that. Good to know!
I ended up going with fibermesh hair for eyebrows and pubic hair on my first character, and I'm doing the same with the one I'm currently working on.
But I'm still undecided on the makeup. I really like the idea of using a geo shell for this, and I'm trying to see how far I can take this. One challenge is to keep it easy for the user, so I'm looking at what I can do with just one shell. That certainly limits the color variations for eyeshadow, blush, etc. What I have so far essentially uses the same color for shadow and blush, but the eyeliner and lips can be different. An example is attached.
Of course, with multiple geo shells, verything could have its own mask and material settings. But I worry that it would be a pain for users unless I included scripts to somehow make everything easy.
Nice character.
Please slight asymetry in the fibermesh eyebrows!
Speaking purely as a user -- and one who frequently forgets that women wear makeup, so take it for what it's worth -- I would FAR rather have direct material sets for makeup applied to the texture itself as opposed to geometry shells. One of the main difficulties with geometry shells in this case is that they extend over the entire body -- the head doesn't have its own separate geometry for that purpose -- so then you're going to wind up with clothes that set themselves further away from the body than you might want, and no way to do anything with that. If I were stuck with geometry shells for makeup, I would very likely see if there was a way to go in and apply the image maps to the facial texture myself, and if not, I'd consider returning the product, because the nuisance wouldn't be worth it.
I'd even prefer LIE presets or diffuse overlay for makeup (annoying as not being able to see diffuse overlay in the workspace unless Iray preview is on -- and that's a massive overhead hit) to geometry shells.
Thanks for your perspective on this. I really appreciate it. I have to wonder, though, if the unneeded faces and groups (i.e., everything but face, lips, and head) are disabled, does that reduce or even eliminate the chance of such interference? Is the geometry associated with those disabled elements itself hidden? Anyone out there with the technical knowledge on this?
Excellent point!
It is possible to hide parts of a shell, by surface group or face group - they are listed, with on/off buttons, in the Parameters pane. As far as I know that will affect Smoothing Modifiers (or dForce simulations)
That's how I have the shell set up now: all surfaces and face groups except for what I need to texture the face are turned off. And it would be saved into the preset this way, of course.
I guess it's going to need more experimetning and testing to see if I can uncover any issues.
The big thing with geoshells, if you're making this to sell, is that users hate geoshells :D You can't select them in the viewport, users tend to delete the figure with the geoshell and get mad, if you don't set up a script on your makeups to remove the previous geoshell set, you'll have more than one set on at once unless you set the makeups up as hierarchical mats so they don't have to select the geoshell (which you should do), but then you lose the combineability of the makeups. Geoshells definitely give you more options, but they are really kind of a pita to work with. I highly recommend going the diffuse overlay route.
Edit: And I've used geoshells, LIE and diffuse overlay when making products.
Thanks so much for your input on this. Part of me is wanting to be stubborn about the geoshells, but another part is preparing to go the route of diffuse overlays. At least for the characters. I might be talking myself into doing a standalone makeup product using geoshells, where the customer knows exactly what they are getting into and chooses to do so....