dForce Hair (as well as strand based hair and the strand based hair editor) in public beta

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  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,926
    BlueIrene said:

    Strand based hair works very well with Catalyzer: https://i.imgur.com/4hSMwCp.png

    Some critique/questions, though;

    1) The painting of the fur part has no eraser option. It would need one if a person wants to be exact.

    2) How to use textures for the colours in the strand based program? Or is it unable to use the diffuse layer to pick the strand colours?

    3) How does one create their own dforce hair? Can it be applied to existing hair models (so far, the answer seems a resounding nope.)

    As far as number two goes, change the colours of the Iray shaded hair (under the 'Surfaces' tab) to something close to white but not exact, then load your image in beside each one. I have been experimenting with the image textures included with DG Iray 200 Hair Color Shaders since I already owned the product, but you can make your own images. I haven't got any more time to mess with this now, but will have another later I expect. The strands run horizontally across the UV map, and a bit of trial and error should soon get us all putting our colors where we want them to go.

    Yeah, the issue for me, is, that I render a lot of animals, thus I need to be very exact with the markings on the fur.

    https://i.imgur.com/i4aVC7n.png using the diffuse of the model.

    I guess I could try to do a LAMH texture and try to apply it as the texture.

    For what you are talking about you need to be able to have a) multiple colors alternate on the same hair shaft like a striped horizontally hair shaft - already the root and tip can be different colors but I think it's a gradient shade. b) and painstaking paint multiple hair density control sets that match the tiger, tabby cat, jaguar or whatever fur pattern you want, even if the hair density & length are the same. It would be nice though if we could do most of the 'painting' just be selecting polygon sets on the model!

    I mean, that is how LAMH works, you put a texture, it replicates the pattern on it onto the fur. I'm not saying the new hair thing sucks, note.

    That would be cool too.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,926

    Oh, I like the Picasso Hair dye method, I will try it thanks.

  • Sfariah DSfariah D Posts: 25,689

    Can it do something like bird feathers?  I see a bunch of birds in the outdoor patio of the all I am at.

    wonder how hard it would be to use this to turn the rodent metamorph into a North American squirrel?

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 96,737
    BlueIrene said:

    Strand based hair works very well with Catalyzer: https://i.imgur.com/4hSMwCp.png

    Some critique/questions, though;

    1) The painting of the fur part has no eraser option. It would need one if a person wants to be exact.

    2) How to use textures for the colours in the strand based program? Or is it unable to use the diffuse layer to pick the strand colours?

    3) How does one create their own dforce hair? Can it be applied to existing hair models (so far, the answer seems a resounding nope.)

    As far as number two goes, change the colours of the Iray shaded hair (under the 'Surfaces' tab) to something close to white but not exact, then load your image in beside each one. I have been experimenting with the image textures included with DG Iray 200 Hair Color Shaders since I already owned the product, but you can make your own images. I haven't got any more time to mess with this now, but will have another later I expect. The strands run horizontally across the UV map, and a bit of trial and error should soon get us all putting our colors where we want them to go.

    Yeah, the issue for me, is, that I render a lot of animals, thus I need to be very exact with the markings on the fur.

    https://i.imgur.com/i4aVC7n.png using the diffuse of the model.

    I guess I could try to do a LAMH texture and try to apply it as the texture.

    For what you are talking about you need to be able to have a) multiple colors alternate on the same hair shaft like a striped horizontally hair shaft - already the root and tip can be different colors but I think it's a gradient shade. b) and painstaking paint multiple hair density control sets that match the tiger, tabby cat, jaguar or whatever fur pattern you want, even if the hair density & length are the same. It would be nice though if we could do most of the 'painting' just be selecting polygon sets on the model!

    I mean, that is how LAMH works, you put a texture, it replicates the pattern on it onto the fur. I'm not saying the new hair thing sucks, note.

    That would be cool too.

    That is how the supplied shader does it.

  • MattymanxMattymanx Posts: 6,879

    Strand based hair works very well with Catalyzer: https://i.imgur.com/4hSMwCp.png

    Some critique/questions, though;

    1) The painting of the fur part has no eraser option. It would need one if a person wants to be exact.

    2) How to use textures for the colours in the strand based program? Or is it unable to use the diffuse layer to pick the strand colours?

    3) How does one create their own dforce hair? Can it be applied to existing hair models (so far, the answer seems a resounding nope.)

     

    You do not need to use the Catalyzer with it.  Make sure you download the updated dForce Starter Essentials to get access to the new hair shader

    For the painting and erasing, 0% will remove anything you painted.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,136
    DAZ_Josh said:

    I applied it to the Root and Tip Transmission Colors and the Root and Tip Color properties

    Thanks, I'll give that a try.

  • nicsttnicstt Posts: 11,714

    Interesting, but....can't help wondering how much computing power and memory is going to be needed to handle all those strands in sensible timescales.  Like Iray, could become a source of some frustration for those of us unable to shell out large sums for new hardware.

    I would have much preferred a proper, working IK system - posing would be sooo much easier.  That would be much less resource-hungry for sure.  (And the option to turn off auto-keyframing before it drives me nuts.)

    I can get realistic poses now; the IK system works pretty good, as long as you select the post tool. Hair needs a lot more lovin that posing does.

  • MattymanxMattymanx Posts: 6,879

    I only saw a couple of the things mentioned as already available and importantly could only select hair when styling by selecting hair control points on the hair itself. I would like to select hair by polygon on the human model and be able to assign those polygons to styling sets.

    I saw no way to manually select any polygons in order to paint them instead of dragging a cursor for a varying hair density sets. And also how to select individual polygons or groups of polygons to create individual styling sets. The sine curves and such I did see but aren't very useful if I can't create individual styling sets by grouping polygons. They also aren't very precise or we'd be seeing lots of Giralbaldi hair presets in the DAZ Store for a long time already.

    And if those things above can be done tell me how to select a polygon line I in a polygon set and set the hair length at X there and have the hair length shorten to hair length Y at the otherside of the bounding polygon at line J.that I select. Basically being able to design an accurate taper cut.

    A way to tell Strand Hair I want to put the hair in rollers of radius R for the selected polygon would be helpful. I didn't see that either. A springy / limp factor for the hair strands would be nice just like real springs have and would effect how the hair comes out of the curlers.

    Can individual polygons be selected and grouped into new styling sets or not? I guess I will try and find a Girbaldi PDF in my DAZ Content to find out.

     

    LAMH and Garibaldi never worked the same.  The two are very different.

     

    The reason why there are no Garibaldi hair products in the store is because there was no way to make the item so that it could not be re-combed and have a derivative work made from it.

  • GafftheHorseGafftheHorse Posts: 567

    W-w-w-what? But this is amazing! Why aren’t more people going bananas for this announcement?

    The only thing a little unclear to me was whether we are able to use existing hair is with us using the D-force tool?

     

    Probably it's 'cause it's only in the Beta. Bananas will come, eventually, not everyone uses the Beta, and fewer still keep an eye on the Beta thread - I only found out because of an oblique reference I didn't understand on a Deviant Art post and decided to find out what it was in relation to.

  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 11,287

    .

    Leana said:

    Must we render the hair to see it properly? The NVidia Iray preview doesn't work. This makes it kind of annoying. That said, this has been way more stable for me than prior versions of Garibaldi.

    Here's a post from Rob about viewing strand based hair in Iray preview: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4581461/#Comment_4581461

    Thank you!! Took awhile for me to find the "Preview PR Hairs" setting. If anyone else is wondering, with the Strand-Based Hair selected in the Scene tab, go to Parameters. Under General, there's Line Tessellation, and that's where you can turn "Preview PR Hairs" on.

    Thank you! That's helpful! :)

    I think Daz was smart to have it off by default, it definitely taxes the system to have it on. But I think it's nice to be able to toggle it off and on so that you don't have to do a full render everytime you want to check to see what the hair looks like.

  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 11,287
    AllenArt said:
    AllenArt said:
    AllenArt said:

     

    WHOA! That looks fantastic! I can't believe it's your first one - what even? lol  You're a natural at it! surprise

    A natural???!! LMAO...you wouldn't have said that if you'd seen me screwing it up and fixing, screwing it up and fixing, screwing it up and fixing....hahaha. As Jeff Foxworthy once said, I probably "looked like a monkey doing a math problem" laugh Plus, a short style on a male is a far cry from some of the more complicated styles for women out there.

    I think I'll have to get a decent tablet if I want to do the strand hair because I'm just not adept or precise enough with a mouse.. I think I might start doing hairs in sections too - breaking a style down into parts of similar hair directions and/or lengths and do it that way. It's just too hard to do all in one big clump and way too clumsy ;)

    Laurie

    Seriously - your hair came out better than some of the hair I've purchased in the store even - so KUDOS! That looks fantastic and if it was for sale I'd throw my money at you! lol

    Having a tablet definitely helps. Thankfully my 10 year old Wacom tablet is still alive and kicking - it's making the styling much easier. :)

    You can work on the hair in sections, it looks like. In the Style Window under Style Curve Tools - a couple of those on the top row lets you select just parts of the hair to work with and not have it affect the surrounding hair. :)

    Found what looks to be a nice tablet for a hundred bucks. Haven't had a tablet in a long time...will need to get used to it again. LOL

    Thanks for the kind words. I feel like it really was kind of a lucky thing how it turned out. I'm not sure I could duplicate it. LMAO

    It's a good thing it will let you do hair in sections. I think that will be a huge help with some styles and allow me to get a nice sharp part or have hair change directions sharply that much easier. It was really fun to try and amazingly, renders REALLY fast. I'm very pleased :)

    Laurie

    Yeah, I'm really surprised that it renders pretty fast. I figured with all that hair information to read it would take ages, but the renders I've done with it were pretty fast. 

    I'm absolutely loving the Strand Based Hair! :)

  • Lukken23Lukken23 Posts: 2
    edited May 2019

    First attempt at a basic hair for a WIP character using the strand based hair tool.

    The tool needs a few improvements and debugging but amazing results.

    Soon I will test this hair with dforce to see how it behaves...

    HH2.jpg
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    Post edited by Lukken23 on
  • WonderlandWonderland Posts: 6,735

    I’m hoping this leads to new dog shapes like poodles, Maltese, etc... But I guess we could make some interesting mutts...  And of course, still hoping for a new long awaited cat and big cats better than the Hivewire ones that could take advantage of this... I have LAMH and never even took the time to use it. Hope the learning curve is not too bad...

     

  • EboshijaanaEboshijaana Posts: 439
    DAZ_Josh said:

    I applied it to the Root and Tip Transmission Colors and the Root and Tip Color properties

    Did you change the colour the shader used?

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,926

    Can it do something like bird feathers?  I see a bunch of birds in the outdoor patio of the all I am at.

    wonder how hard it would be to use this to turn the rodent metamorph into a North American squirrel?

    For bird feathers you would want to design hair as vary length and thickness spikes and export as objects to create the different type of feather shafts a bird would have. Then you'd select two opposite parallel edges of all like shafts and add new hair density maps and then you'd need to grow more hair shafts in single file on those parallel edges. It would be much easier I think for the DAZ programmers to add a feather function for the 4 or 5 unique type of bird feathers programmatically I think than to manually go through and try all that. 

  • edited May 2019
    Leana said:

    where does one download this

    You can download the new beta with DIM. Make sure DIM filters are set to show “public builds”, they might be hidden by default.

    did that but still see nothing added ty for ur time

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    Post edited by tinkstar_8a2fb05047 on
  • namffuaknamffuak Posts: 4,061
    Leana said:

    where does one download this

    You can download the new beta with DIM. Make sure DIM filters are set to show “public builds”, they might be hidden by default.

    did that but still see nothing added ty for ur time

    If you've never done the beta before you may need to "purchase" it - it's free, but until you go through checkout it won't appear in DIM.

  • WonderlandWonderland Posts: 6,735

    Whenever I load the hair, it loads a duplicate G8 female and even when I fit the hair to the existing character, if I delete the second G8, the hair disappears. How do you get it to load without a character?

  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,073

    Looking on with interest.

  • DAZ_JoshDAZ_Josh Posts: 1,367
    DAZ_Josh said:

    I applied it to the Root and Tip Transmission Colors and the Root and Tip Color properties

    Did you change the colour the shader used?

    Yes, I changed my colors on all those 4 properties to be white so it was just the map doing the influence.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,136
    DAZ_Josh said:
    DAZ_Josh said:

    I applied it to the Root and Tip Transmission Colors and the Root and Tip Color properties

    Did you change the colour the shader used?

    Yes, I changed my colors on all those 4 properties to be white so it was just the map doing the influence.

    I did this (changed 4 maps and changed colors to white), but almost-white areas of the dog fur are still rendeing almost black. Here is a WIP, without much combing yet.

     

    Dog Fur_004.jpg
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  • DAZ_JoshDAZ_Josh Posts: 1,367

    The lighter the hair the lower the glossy layer weight will need to be.

    Right now that glossy layer weight isn't mappable so the black areas of the map might suffer when you make the change. We will likely update the shader with that and some other minor changes.

  • WonderlandWonderland Posts: 6,735

    It seems you can paint hair everywhere EXCEPT the head which makes no sense to me. I never used the Poser hair room because it was too complicated and unless this comes with a really good PDF, doubt I will be using it, it’s so much easier to just paint hair in Photoshop...

  • BlueIreneBlueIrene Posts: 1,318
    edited May 2019

    This is another effort that's no great shakes in the styling department, but I wanted to show how you can create your own colour maps from within the strand-based hair creator/editor (thanks to Richard and Josh for the input on UVs).

    ** Because Genesis hair covers two zones (face and torso) and there is only one mat zone produced by the strand-based hair creator as far as I can tell, this breaks my brain a bit and so I used a skull cap instead - namely one of Fisty's very generous free set over at ShareCG...

    https://sharecg.com/v/91745/

    These are UV-mapped but come without textures, however it is not difficult to export the density map from the strand-based hair creator (SBH from now on - I type with two fingers!) after painting it and then editing it a bit in Photoshop to create diffuse and opacity maps so that the hair doesn't look quite so thin on the scalp. I made my diffuse map black and white so that I could change the colour to whatever I wanted under the 'surfaces' tab in Daz Studio. **

    **Edited to add that I am not using a hair cap any more after discovering that the two colour maps produced by the SBH can be merged together in Photoshop to produce a single map as the UVs in those areas don't overlap.

    Anyway, back to the colour map. All my efforts to import maps have been unsuccessful, but you can create your own colour map under the 'paint' tab of the SBH with fairly limited tools (in other words, it's not Photoshop). Texture control maps are shown to the right of the screen - click 'New' and you will be given the opportunity to create grayscale or colour. Choose 'Color 1024px', and you can then use the colour picker etc below the map list to choose colours and put them wherever you like on the wireframe. When you are done, export the map and save somewhere that you can find it. It will save two images (face and torso) which can be layered above each other in Photoshop, the 'screen' blending mode applied and then saved as a single image which can be used in the colour channels in Daz.

    Under the 'Distribute' tab you will see the current base and tip colours. Click on <no map> below each one and choose the colour map that you have just created from the drop-down list which will appear.

    Untick 'Use preview hair color' just below that somewhere and you will see you colours in the hair.

    On the edit screen, if you tick 'show hairs' and untick the 'Use preview hair color' option, you'll be able to see your colors while you edit too.

    Once your hairdo is back in Daz and you have applied the Iray dual lobe shader, change the colour of the Root Transmission Color, Tip Transmission Color, Hair Root Color and Hair Tip Color (in the diffuse channel under the 'Surfaces' tab) to something close to white, and into each one of these you plug the image that you exported into a carefully saved place from the SBH and edited in Photoshop. Probably obviously, you can have different colours for roots and tips - you just create two colour maps in SBH and name and assign them in there accordingly.

    I hope that helps someone.

    ColourHair.jpg
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    Post edited by BlueIrene on
  • barbultbarbult Posts: 23,136
    DAZ_Josh said:

    The lighter the hair the lower the glossy layer weight will need to be.

    Right now that glossy layer weight isn't mappable so the black areas of the map might suffer when you make the change. We will likely update the shader with that and some other minor changes.

    I've reduced the Glossy Layer Weight to 0.010. I can see that the light hair areas are lighter now, but still darker than I expected. I understand this is all a work in progress (a fabulous one!!).  Thanks again for the tips.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,926
    edited May 2019
    Mattymanx said:

    Thanks, I can't divide out the hair styling by creating a bunch of hair density maps to use as hair styling quadrants, one for each polygon on the head, so I can't style them individually easily. The render only renders current selected map. :-(

    Still, it's worlds better than what I tried in the past.

    It'll be helpful to read about the other things though thank you.

    Duh, sorry - I only need create a new strand hair for each polygon I want hair on and then parent them to a null or something. I will see if my computer can handle that many.

    I'd still like to be able to select polygons as hair density maps and slice parts of them off by dissecting the polygon with control points if need be than to paint with a mouse or digitizer though.

    OK, now this might get to be a bit of fun.

     

    Post edited by nonesuch00 on
  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 11,287
    edited May 2019

    I did some face hair peach fuzz for G8F. :) I think it turned out pretty good. Lots of learning and tweaking and trial and error -but I'm having a lot of fun learning this. :)

    Strand Based Hair - Face Hair Peach Fuzz.png
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    Strand Based Hair - Face Hair Peach Fuzz B.png
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    Post edited by 3Diva on
  • Sorry, I got some dumb questions...

    1/ is there a way to convert a strand based object to dforce? With the mohawk demo, I can't find any way to convert the non-dforce mohawk to dforce, nor can I use the strand based editor on the dforce Mohawk (because it has already been converted to figure prop)

    2/ is there any intention to add a way to import an OBJ containing just lines and vertices (no faces) and apply the strand rendering system to it? I exported the mohawk to OBJ to take a look in blender and all the strands were triangular prisms along the length of the folicles. I feel like you could have some option to "Convert line based object to strand based" by having DS apply something like the "Skin" modifier in blender.

  • QuasarQuasar Posts: 574

    Whenever I load the hair, it loads a duplicate G8 female and even when I fit the hair to the existing character, if I delete the second G8, the hair disappears. How do you get it to load without a character?

    I know the Mohawk loads in with a G8 figure. They must have been saved together when the hair was made. The dForce version can be fit to a different figure but it doesn't seem that the strand based one can. Once you parent the dForce hair to a different figure, however, make sure it isn't parented to the figure you want to delete. The best way to create a new strand based hair for a figure is to select your figure and then click Create>New Strand Based Hair.

     

    It seems you can paint hair everywhere EXCEPT the head which makes no sense to me. I never used the Poser hair room because it was too complicated and unless this comes with a really good PDF, doubt I will be using it, it’s so much easier to just paint hair in Photoshop...

    You should be able to paint on any surface that is selected in the Setup tab of the hair editor interface. For G8, you have to select Torso and Face to access the whole head surface.

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