@barbult What are your render times like with all the strand hair? And if I may be so bold; how much RAM do you have and what sort of graphics card? All this looks great, but I really don't want my computer locking up with it.
@zombietaggerung I let the latest render go for over an hour, but I had HD morphs, character render subD 4, reflective surfaces, caustic sampler, LIE Tattoos, render size 1600 by 2000. I have a 980ti graphics card (2 generations old now) which is also running two large monitors. I have 32 GB of RAM in my Windows 10 computer. As an experiment, I took that last scene and deleted all character morphs, set G8M render subD to 2, used a flat gray texture with no LIE on G8M, turned off the caustic sampler, so I could see how long it took to render the hair in that situation. I stopped the render at about 95% and about 10 minutes. The log says IRAY rend info : Received update to 01115 iterations after 611.463s. GPU-Z reported a memory usage of 2372 MB (remember I am also driving two large monitors). This is the result.
This is my latest creation with hair, eyebrows and beard created by the Strand-Based Hair Editor.
Great work on that. I particularly like the look of the materials and of course the overall design.
Are these materials created in the tool itself?
If so, how? Could you elaborate more on that topic, please.
@Artini, materials for hair render are set up in the Surfaces tab, just like any other rendered item. I applied the new dual lobe Iray hair shader and tweaked the settings. It is a real challenge to get the surface settings looking good. The highlights are way way to bright for me by default with bright scene lighting.
This is my latest creation with hair, eyebrows and beard created by the Strand-Based Hair Editor.
Great work on that. I particularly like the look of the materials and of course the overall design.
Are these materials created in the tool itself?
If so, how? Could you elaborate more on that topic, please.
@Artini, materials for hair render are set up in the Surfaces tab, just like any other rendered item. I applied the new dual lobe Iray hair shader and tweaked the settings. It is a real challenge to get the surface settings looking good. The highlights are way way to bright for me by default with bright scene lighting.
I shared this image a couple pages back. Note the hair has a "hard" transition between the dark roots and the bleached blonde look. I wasted a lot of time trying to get that look by "tweak a setting, render a test image," again and again. Finally, I set "Preview PR Hairs" to On and the Draw Mode to Nvidia Iray.
With the hair being rendered in the Viewport, I was finally able to see what I was doing as I tweaked settings. And because I could see the changes as I was making them, I also got a better idea of what the settings do. I recommend, also, that when you find something that you think looks good, to go ahead and create a material preset for it, before you try something else. I've got a lovely brown-hair render of this hair, but no idea what the settings were…
FWIW: My video card is only one generation newer than @barbult's, a GTX 1080, but it didn't have any trouble with the hair in the viewport.
Here are a couple more strange things I made with the hair editor. I like the colors and textures in these.
I LOVE these kinds of things. I am holding out hope that the human (and other) hair will get better and better, and I know it is very, very early, but shows so much promise. RawArt's Ape prototype will be an Insta-Buy. But these two images of Barbult's make me think "OK, OKAYYYY! I need to try this TONIGHT!"
So okay, how do I get rid of a part in the hair once it shows up?
I somehow turned a dial the wrong way, the hair is now parting, and no matter which way I go it wont disappear again.
Auto Parting control is on the Style tab. Click the arrow to expand it to see the slider. Change the value of the slider to control the amount of parting applied.
Can this new dforce hair be applied to fabric as well? The reason why is if dforce hair simulates so much faster, could it help fabric simulate faster, too?
Can this new dforce hair be applied to fabric as well? The reason why is if dforce hair simulates so much faster, could it help fabric simulate faster, too?
Or is this an exclusive PA only feature.
It would be a PA only feature, but the hair and cloth simulations are very different - I don't think the hair model would be useful on clothing.
I'll assume not everyone following this thread is also following the beta thread in the Software forums, so I just wanted to share what I found. There is an intentional variation of the editor which isn't of much use to us mere mortals, er, users, that only shows the Style tab with limited functionality. For PAs, apparently, it helps them to create morphs for their dForce Hair products. I stumbled across this "easter egg," (As Cris Palomino called it,) because I set a keyboard shortcut for the editor. To access this limited editor, one holds down the Ctrl key, (Cmd on a Mac, I presume,) when clicking on the Edit Strand-Based Hair… menu item. I was getting this result with my shortcut because I used the Ctrl key.
If you're like me, and want a keyboard shortcut for the editor, just make sure the Ctrl key isn't part of the sequence, and it should work just fine. (You can assign keyboard shortcuts by hitting F3. In the resulting dialog window, locate the item in the left column, right-click on the item, select Change Keyboard Shortcut in the popup menu, and then enter the key sequence. You'll see the Shortcut show up next to your item. Be sure to click on Accept to save and exit the dialog window.)
If you check the chnage log this has now been split more obviously, with separate commands for the full and morph-friendly versions.
@barbult What are your render times like with all the strand hair? And if I may be so bold; how much RAM do you have and what sort of graphics card? All this looks great, but I really don't want my computer locking up with it.
@zombietaggerung I let the latest render go for over an hour, but I had HD morphs, character render subD 4, reflective surfaces, caustic sampler, LIE Tattoos, render size 1600 by 2000. I have a 980ti graphics card (2 generations old now) which is also running two large monitors. I have 32 GB of RAM in my Windows 10 computer. As an experiment, I took that last scene and deleted all character morphs, set G8M render subD to 2, used a flat gray texture with no LIE on G8M, turned off the caustic sampler, so I could see how long it took to render the hair in that situation. I stopped the render at about 95% and about 10 minutes. The log says IRAY rend info : Received update to 01115 iterations after 611.463s. GPU-Z reported a memory usage of 2372 MB (remember I am also driving two large monitors). This is the result.
Thank you for the info. That's very promising for me. :)
@PhilW @barbult@algovincian Thank you so much for the great feedback and comments - you've made my day! I'm having a TON of fun with the strand based hair. This tool is MASSIVELY powerful. I haven't even started playing with dForce hair yet as I'm still learning the regular strand based hair and having a TON OF FUN with it! :D This is an incredible gift that Daz has given us! ahhhhhh This was like one of the final steps in being able to push realism farther with 3D figures - as hair (aside from a small handful of top-notch PAs) was often a dead "give away" that an image was 3D. The Strand Based Hair is giving us a giant leap forward in helping us to achieve realism with our renders! Thank you, Daz!
Has anyone figured out how to make the hairs NOT feather? I.E. All be one length.
I go into and style the hair to be (more or less) the same length, but when I render or go to Clump view, it is feathered...
I don't know if this is the right way to do it, but what I do is extend the length of the hair until the shortest hairs are the length that I want and then cut the hairs so that they're all that same length.
Auto Parting control is on the Style tab. Click the arrow to expand it to see the slider. Change the value of the slider to control the amount of parting applied.
THank you for posting that. I had completely forgotten about that feature and how useful it is to help prevent weird issues where the hair parts.
Has anyone figured out how to make the hairs NOT feather? I.E. All be one length.
I go into and style the hair to be (more or less) the same length, but when I render or go to Clump view, it is feathered...
They should be the same length and that's what's causing the feathering. You want to be able to make the top ones longer as you go up the head so I guess that's called a form of tapering. I've already opened a ticket with DAZ 3D and requested they add a tapering feature to this tool as well as some other styling features.
I think the specific cut where it appears all the hairs are the same length, the the higher ones are actually longer, is called a blunt cut.
Is it @RAMWolff that is a barber/hair stylist? He should list for us here & write a ticket requesting a long list of barbering/hair styling features and props like he must use or others must use (maybe he is a barber or maybe he is a hair stylist, maybe for men, maybe for women, maybe for both, but they are different approaches) to professionally do his job.
Yes, I'm a practicing cosmotologist but this is still in beta. It does concern me that there seems to be no way that folks can't make the hair creation process with on one end of a slider (My idea) to have it all one length for that particular "shave group" and on the other end for the hairs to be varied in lengths (like for instance a person that's not had a cut in a few months or a person that's had their hair texturized to give a more broken up look to the hair cut.
This is my latest creation with hair, eyebrows and beard created by the Strand-Based Hair Editor.
You should consider submitting some of the hair styles you create to be sold in the store.
@DAZ_Steve, I'm flattered that you think they are good enough! I will consider it. At this point, I still have some struggles. Can you shed any light on solutions?
I don't even know the correct way to save a hair style so other people could load and use it. I'm saving the hair parts together in a scene subset, but to reload them I have to fit each part to the character in the scene and then open and accept the editor on each one. That is probably not commercially viable.
I don't understand the new dual lobe shader well enough to get consistent results in different lighting scenarios. The highlights get way out of control. The hair is dark even though I use very light colors in the surfaces. I can tweak things for a single render, but if I change lights, the settings have to be changed. I haven't found any documentation on the shader parameters yet, and I don't know what things like "Highlight Weight" and "Highlight Separation" do.
Has anyone figured out how to make the hairs NOT feather? I.E. All be one length.
I go into and style the hair to be (more or less) the same length, but when I render or go to Clump view, it is feathered...
I'm not sure if this is sexactly what you are asking, but Rob says:
If you want the style guide curves to remain longer so that you retain the ability to control the style of the hair when that hairstyle grows out, use a (gray) map on the Tweak > Reduce Length control to attenuate the lengths and shape the shortened length from the grown out length.
New one from me. I think I'm getting some of this down, still have a lot to learn. It's fun figuring out what the different settings do and experimenting.
Has anyone figured out how to make the hairs NOT feather? I.E. All be one length.
I go into and style the hair to be (more or less) the same length, but when I render or go to Clump view, it is feathered...
I think your problem there are those shorter guidehairs on the rest of the scalp. From what I understand, strand based hair basically works by trying to interpolate the hair between ALL the guidehairs in the group. Because of all of those shorter, straight guidelines at the top, the tool is all like "oh, we need to smoothly blend between these sections, so lets make it feathered".
My advice is to split the hair into multiple hair objects. Have that long bit at the bottom as it's own seperate object with ONLY the hair there. If you don't want to do that, you could try messing around with the auto-parting options to see if that'll make the tool treat those two sections seperately.
Yes, I'm a practicing cosmotologist but this is still in beta. It does concern me that there seems to be no way that folks can't make the hair creation process with on one end of a slider (My idea) to have it all one length for that particular "shave group" and on the other end for the hairs to be varied in lengths (like for instance a person that's not had a cut in a few months or a person that's had their hair texturized to give a more broken up look to the hair cut.
Comments
@barbult, @Divamakeup - great work, you are really showing what can be done, I'm very excited by the arrival of these new tools.
Her hair looks great, Diva! I really need to get off my butt and install the latest beta.
- Greg
Great work on that. I particularly like the look of the materials and of course the overall design.
Are these materials created in the tool itself?
If so, how? Could you elaborate more on that topic, please.
I am really digging this system for fur now. Finally getting some good results
(this guy wont be released for a few months yet)
So okay, how do I get rid of a part in the hair once it shows up?
I somehow turned a dial the wrong way, the hair is now parting, and no matter which way I go it wont disappear again.
Looks great, way to go barbult!
@zombietaggerung I let the latest render go for over an hour, but I had HD morphs, character render subD 4, reflective surfaces, caustic sampler, LIE Tattoos, render size 1600 by 2000. I have a 980ti graphics card (2 generations old now) which is also running two large monitors. I have 32 GB of RAM in my Windows 10 computer. As an experiment, I took that last scene and deleted all character morphs, set G8M render subD to 2, used a flat gray texture with no LIE on G8M, turned off the caustic sampler, so I could see how long it took to render the hair in that situation. I stopped the render at about 95% and about 10 minutes. The log says IRAY rend info : Received update to 01115 iterations after 611.463s. GPU-Z reported a memory usage of 2372 MB (remember I am also driving two large monitors). This is the result.
@Artini, materials for hair render are set up in the Surfaces tab, just like any other rendered item. I applied the new dual lobe Iray hair shader and tweaked the settings. It is a real challenge to get the surface settings looking good. The highlights are way way to bright for me by default with bright scene lighting.
Diva, great hair! I haven't figured out long hair. My attempts have been failures so far. You show that it can be done. I'll try some more.
He looks really cool. The beginning of Ape World 8?
I shared this image a couple pages back. Note the hair has a "hard" transition between the dark roots and the bleached blonde look. I wasted a lot of time trying to get that look by "tweak a setting, render a test image," again and again. Finally, I set "Preview PR Hairs" to On and the Draw Mode to Nvidia Iray.
With the hair being rendered in the Viewport, I was finally able to see what I was doing as I tweaked settings. And because I could see the changes as I was making them, I also got a better idea of what the settings do. I recommend, also, that when you find something that you think looks good, to go ahead and create a material preset for it, before you try something else. I've got a lovely brown-hair render of this hair, but no idea what the settings were…

FWIW: My video card is only one generation newer than @barbult's, a GTX 1080, but it didn't have any trouble with the hair in the viewport.
Yep....been waiting a long tome to do that one :)
I LOVE these kinds of things. I am holding out hope that the human (and other) hair will get better and better, and I know it is very, very early, but shows so much promise. RawArt's Ape prototype will be an Insta-Buy. But these two images of Barbult's make me think "OK, OKAYYYY! I need to try this TONIGHT!"
Keep going everyone! Very encouraging!
Auto Parting control is on the Style tab. Click the arrow to expand it to see the slider. Change the value of the slider to control the amount of parting applied.
Can this new dforce hair be applied to fabric as well? The reason why is if dforce hair simulates so much faster, could it help fabric simulate faster, too?
Or is this an exclusive PA only feature.
It would be a PA only feature, but the hair and cloth simulations are very different - I don't think the hair model would be useful on clothing.
If you check the chnage log this has now been split more obviously, with separate commands for the full and morph-friendly versions.
You should consider submitting some of the hair styles you create to be sold in the store.
Thank you for the info. That's very promising for me. :)
@PhilW @barbult @algovincian Thank you so much for the great feedback and comments - you've made my day! I'm having a TON of fun with the strand based hair. This tool is MASSIVELY powerful. I haven't even started playing with dForce hair yet as I'm still learning the regular strand based hair and having a TON OF FUN with it! :D This is an incredible gift that Daz has given us! ahhhhhh This was like one of the final steps in being able to push realism farther with 3D figures - as hair (aside from a small handful of top-notch PAs) was often a dead "give away" that an image was 3D. The Strand Based Hair is giving us a giant leap forward in helping us to achieve realism with our renders! Thank you, Daz!
Has anyone figured out how to make the hairs NOT feather? I.E. All be one length.
I go into and style the hair to be (more or less) the same length, but when I render or go to Clump view, it is feathered...
I don't know if this is the right way to do it, but what I do is extend the length of the hair until the shortest hairs are the length that I want and then cut the hairs so that they're all that same length.
THank you for posting that. I had completely forgotten about that feature and how useful it is to help prevent weird issues where the hair parts.
They should be the same length and that's what's causing the feathering. You want to be able to make the top ones longer as you go up the head so I guess that's called a form of tapering. I've already opened a ticket with DAZ 3D and requested they add a tapering feature to this tool as well as some other styling features.
I think the specific cut where it appears all the hairs are the same length, the the higher ones are actually longer, is called a blunt cut.
Is it @RAMWolff that is a barber/hair stylist? He should list for us here & write a ticket requesting a long list of barbering/hair styling features and props like he must use or others must use (maybe he is a barber or maybe he is a hair stylist, maybe for men, maybe for women, maybe for both, but they are different approaches) to professionally do his job.
Yes, I'm a practicing cosmotologist but this is still in beta. It does concern me that there seems to be no way that folks can't make the hair creation process with on one end of a slider (My idea) to have it all one length for that particular "shave group" and on the other end for the hairs to be varied in lengths (like for instance a person that's not had a cut in a few months or a person that's had their hair texturized to give a more broken up look to the hair cut.
Tooks I use are scissors,Chunk sheers, texturizing sheers and razor
@DAZ_Steve, I'm flattered that you think they are good enough! I will consider it. At this point, I still have some struggles. Can you shed any light on solutions?
I'm not sure if this is sexactly what you are asking, but Rob says:
New one from me. I think I'm getting some of this down, still have a lot to learn. It's fun figuring out what the different settings do and experimenting.
I think your problem there are those shorter guidehairs on the rest of the scalp. From what I understand, strand based hair basically works by trying to interpolate the hair between ALL the guidehairs in the group. Because of all of those shorter, straight guidelines at the top, the tool is all like "oh, we need to smoothly blend between these sections, so lets make it feathered".
My advice is to split the hair into multiple hair objects. Have that long bit at the bottom as it's own seperate object with ONLY the hair there. If you don't want to do that, you could try messing around with the auto-parting options to see if that'll make the tool treat those two sections seperately.
thanks