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

barbult · June 2019

Gone said:

Made a simple short hair on a G1 hair cap and applied it to a variety of generations.

For M4, the cap was parented and scaled to 103%. The rest were autofitted. M4 and G8M are base while the rest have some morphs dialed in. No tweaking was done to the hair it was just applied to the character as is.

Rendered in 3delight.

That looks really nice! If you save the scene and reopen it, does the hair cap an hair stay on the head of the morphed characters? I had problems with this scenario. After reopening the saved scene, if the the hair cap had smoothing and collision on, the hair cap and strand based hair loaded in a spot separated from the character (not where it was when the scene was saved). It wasn't noticeable on characters without much morphing from the base, but on highly morphed characters, it was drastic. Here is my report of the problem I had. I'm very interested in whether you have the same problem.

3Diva · June 2019

barbult said:

Gone said:

Made a simple short hair on a G1 hair cap and applied it to a variety of generations.

For M4, the cap was parented and scaled to 103%. The rest were autofitted. M4 and G8M are base while the rest have some morphs dialed in. No tweaking was done to the hair it was just applied to the character as is.

Rendered in 3delight.

That looks really nice! If you save the scene and reopen it, does the hair cap an hair stay on the head of the morphed characters? I had problems with this scenario. After reopening the saved scene, if the the hair cap had smoothing and collision on, the hair cap and strand based hair loaded in a spot separated from the character (not where it was when the scene was saved). It wasn't noticeable on characters without much morphing from the base, but on highly morphed characters, it was drastic. Here is my report of the problem I had. I'm very interested in whether you have the same problem.

Maybe try turning the smoothing off then back on. That seemed to fix the issue when I was experiencing that. When I turned smoothing of it popped back into place then I just turned smoothing back on and it stayed. Seams I needed to do that every time I load the scene but it just takes a couple of seconds to turn smoothing off then back on. I hope that it works for your situation as well.

barbult · June 2019

Divamakeup said:

barbult said:

Gone said:

Made a simple short hair on a G1 hair cap and applied it to a variety of generations.

For M4, the cap was parented and scaled to 103%. The rest were autofitted. M4 and G8M are base while the rest have some morphs dialed in. No tweaking was done to the hair it was just applied to the character as is.

Rendered in 3delight.

That looks really nice! If you save the scene and reopen it, does the hair cap an hair stay on the head of the morphed characters? I had problems with this scenario. After reopening the saved scene, if the the hair cap had smoothing and collision on, the hair cap and strand based hair loaded in a spot separated from the character (not where it was when the scene was saved). It wasn't noticeable on characters without much morphing from the base, but on highly morphed characters, it was drastic. Here is my report of the problem I had. I'm very interested in whether you have the same problem.

Maybe try turning the smoothing off then back on. That seemed to fix the issue when I was experiencing that. When I turned smoothing of it popped back into place then I just turned smoothing back on and it stayed. Seams I needed to do that every time I load the scene but it just takes a couple of seconds to turn smoothing off then back on. I hope that it works for your situation as well.

Just toggling the hair cap visibility fixes the misalignment, too. I haven't tried toggling smoothing. Thanks for the info. I submitted it as a bug report.

Gone · June 2019

Barbult: To answer your question, everything stays where it belongs. My question to you is - why do you even bother with smoothing and collision on a cap?

The cap is just a "placeholder" for the hair. I make it invisible because the goal is to make the hair look like it is growing from whatever figures head you put it on. Any smoothing you do would be on the hair not the cap.

Leonides02: Tips? It all depends on what you are doing. The main thing is to try to keep the file as light as you can get away with. A normal full head of hair is usually between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs but you can get a great look with less than half that - sometimes as little as a third.

The main part of the hair only has to be thick enough to look good. Since this will make for a bad looking hairline, you would create a second layer (with a different seed) that only covers the hairline. This will fill in the hairline without adding many verts to the overall file size. If it is really needed, you can create a short "skull cap" style of hair much like many poly hair products do. This will let you keep the main hair count down and lower the vert count accordingly. For long hair, you can often get away with a large base size and small tip size - especially if you use a second layer to fill in the hairline.

For animals, it is tempting to do a full coverage of hair. That isn't always necessary. A lower hair count well blended with the "fur" texture can often give impressive results. Particularly when the fur is generally flat to the body.

When designing your hair, don't overllook the value of layers. Often, 2 or 3 layers can yield great results with lower overall hair and vert counts than trying to do it all in one layer.

Attached is a hair I did a little while ago in Garibaldi. The amount is set to 60 with base/tip at 0.1/ 0.01. It generates 38,731 hairs with 2,522,046 verts. Since SB hair is based on Garibaldi, there is no reason not the expect the same result. I could have used a hairline layer but I figured this was good enough. :)

A lot of people have trouble with "flyaway" hair along the part line. There are several ways to deal with this. First play with the autopart setting. The default is 180 but I find 100 usually tames things. A grey scale map in the autopart setting can also help here. Above that is the setting surface lattice smooth. Changing it to linear will provide a more agressive parting. If all else fails, use layers for each side of the part. You can get some interesting overlap looks with layers.

I guess that's it for now.

barbult · June 2019

@Gone, in my design, the hair cap is a visible part of the hair design. That is why I used smoothing and collision.

WendyLuvsCatz · June 2019

Gone said:

Barbult: To answer your question, everything stays where it belongs. My question to you is - why do you even bother with smoothing and collision on a cap?

The cap is just a "placeholder" for the hair. I make it invisible because the goal is to make the hair look like it is growing from whatever figures head you put it on. Any smoothing you do would be on the hair not the cap.

Leonides02: Tips? It all depends on what you are doing. The main thing is to try to keep the file as light as you can get away with. A normal full head of hair is usually between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs but you can get a great look with less than half that - sometimes as little as a third.

The main part of the hair only has to be thick enough to look good. Since this will make for a bad looking hairline, you would create a second layer (with a different seed) that only covers the hairline. This will fill in the hairline without adding many verts to the overall file size. If it is really needed, you can create a short "skull cap" style of hair much like many poly hair products do. This will let you keep the main hair count down and lower the vert count accordingly. For long hair, you can often get away with a large base size and small tip size - especially if you use a second layer to fill in the hairline.

For animals, it is tempting to do a full coverage of hair. That isn't always necessary. A lower hair count well blended with the "fur" texture can often give impressive results. Particularly when the fur is generally flat to the body.

When designing your hair, don't overllook the value of layers. Often, 2 or 3 layers can yield great results with lower overall hair and vert counts than trying to do it all in one layer.

Attached is a hair I did a little while ago in Garibaldi. The amount is set to 60 with base/tip at 0.1/ 0.01. It generates 38,731 hairs with 2,522,046 verts. Since SB hair is based on Garibaldi, there is no reason not the expect the same result. I could have used a hairline layer but I figured this was good enough. :)

A lot of people have trouble with "flyaway" hair along the part line. There are several ways to deal with this. First play with the autopart setting. The default is 180 but I find 100 usually tames things. A grey scale map in the autopart setting can also help here. Above that is the setting surface lattice smooth. Changing it to linear will provide a more agressive parting. If all else fails, use layers for each side of the part. You can get some interesting overlap looks with layers.

I guess that's it for now.

good to hear tips from Garibaldi users

Leonides02 · June 2019

Gone said:

Barbult: To answer your question, everything stays where it belongs. My question to you is - why do you even bother with smoothing and collision on a cap?

The cap is just a "placeholder" for the hair. I make it invisible because the goal is to make the hair look like it is growing from whatever figures head you put it on. Any smoothing you do would be on the hair not the cap.

Leonides02: Tips? It all depends on what you are doing. The main thing is to try to keep the file as light as you can get away with. A normal full head of hair is usually between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs but you can get a great look with less than half that - sometimes as little as a third.

The main part of the hair only has to be thick enough to look good. Since this will make for a bad looking hairline, you would create a second layer (with a different seed) that only covers the hairline. This will fill in the hairline without adding many verts to the overall file size. If it is really needed, you can create a short "skull cap" style of hair much like many poly hair products do. This will let you keep the main hair count down and lower the vert count accordingly. For long hair, you can often get away with a large base size and small tip size - especially if you use a second layer to fill in the hairline.

For animals, it is tempting to do a full coverage of hair. That isn't always necessary. A lower hair count well blended with the "fur" texture can often give impressive results. Particularly when the fur is generally flat to the body.

When designing your hair, don't overllook the value of layers. Often, 2 or 3 layers can yield great results with lower overall hair and vert counts than trying to do it all in one layer.

Attached is a hair I did a little while ago in Garibaldi. The amount is set to 60 with base/tip at 0.1/ 0.01. It generates 38,731 hairs with 2,522,046 verts. Since SB hair is based on Garibaldi, there is no reason not the expect the same result. I could have used a hairline layer but I figured this was good enough. :)

A lot of people have trouble with "flyaway" hair along the part line. There are several ways to deal with this. First play with the autopart setting. The default is 180 but I find 100 usually tames things. A grey scale map in the autopart setting can also help here. Above that is the setting surface lattice smooth. Changing it to linear will provide a more agressive parting. If all else fails, use layers for each side of the part. You can get some interesting overlap looks with layers.

I guess that's it for now.

"That's it?" These are fantastic tips. Thank you for taking the time to write them all out! Now I'm going to go experiment...

PhilW · June 2019

Mustakettu85 said:

PhilW said:

Mustakettu85 said:

PhilW said:

dForce Hair is very flexible, you can change the number/density of hairs, the thickness of each hair, the length (shortening it anyway), all under user control.

This is awesome :)

But what about options such as forehead height or hairline shape? I guess what I'd like to know is whether your dForce hair models are made on a skullcap (which can then be morphed at will to achieve those hairline variants) or whether they are generated directly on G8F. Well, I suspect that even in the latter case it might be possible to modify by introducing specific G8F morphs, of course... But will we be able then to use the model on G8M? If it's cap-based, then it can be parented to just about any figure. If it's not... Is it correct to assume that it's locked to the mesh it was generated on?

OK so I just got back after a couple of weeks holiday so apologies for not responding to any questions for a while - I'm going to trawl through this thread and resond, apologies if this repeats solutions that other people may have posted.

Both of my hairs are grown on caps so you have a couple of options to control where the hair grows - you could do your own morphs for the cap, but perhaps easier is you can make your own density maps for where the hair grows. If you add growth areas where there are no guide hairs then the results may be unpredictable but you could certainly pull the hairline back a bit for example.

Thanks a lot for answering! I was thinking more of pulling the hairline forward and/or adding a hint of a widow peak. Morphing the cap should work, I think.

Yes it should, but editing the density map should also work provided you don't go too mad with it.

Diomede_Carrara said:

@PhilW - thanks for checking the forums and answering questions. Most excellent. I admit that I have not installed the latest Daz beta so please take certain ignorance on my part into account. A key issue for me is how much control I will have with dforce strand based hair. Based on your answers to questions here, even though I would not have complete control of DForce hair as a non-PA, if I buy a DForce strand based hair from a Daz PA and install the beta, I would still be able to make some adjustments. OK, how much? Is it possible to give me an idea of how much customization is possible if I buy a PA dynamic strand based hair, how much subsequent control does a user have over length, density, style, etc. with a pre-bought dynamic strand based hair?

Hi Diomede, users have a good amount of control over a number of things:

- Length - users can shorten hair from the full length, right down to nothing.

- Density - users can control the density of the hair just by inputting a different value. Density is based on density maps, so by creating your own density maps you could also control the distribution of hair that way.

- Thickness - users can control how thick each strand is at both root and tip.

- Segments - users can control how many segments the hair contains, so a shorter segment (=higher segment count) will smooth out the hair, while a longer segment (=fewer segments) will reduce the size when the hair is converted to real geometry.

- Style - This will depend on what morphs the product maker has included. For my own Longdrape and Femme Fatale hairs I have included various shape morphs which give different starting positions for the draping and so will affect how the hair drapes (in front of or behind the shoulders is an obvious one). Styles which are more meant to be used "as is" rather than draped may have different style morphs. Femme Fatale hair comes with some different curl and wave shapes. Whatever the included morphs, there are some things that are always within a users control, such as clumping, random length, random angles, "scraggle" and frizz.

My own products include a selection of presets for these but the user is free to play wit values themselves. They can also change the dynamic variables which will affect the draping. So I would say that users have a lot of control.

Leana · June 2019

Gone said:

why do you even bother with smoothing and collision on a cap?

Sometimes there can be render artifacts if the cap intersects with the figure, even if the cap is not visible. Smoothing and collision will help with that.

Gone · June 2019

barbult said:

@Gone, in my design, the hair cap is a visible part of the hair design. That is why I used smoothing and collision.

Leana said:

Gone said:

why do you even bother with smoothing and collision on a cap?

Sometimes there can be render artifacts if the cap intersects with the figure, even if the cap is not visible. Smoothing and collision will help with that.

Ok, I'll have to take your word for it.

To be honest, I don't do a lot of caps so I haven't had the artifact issue.

Still, with SB hair, I can't understand why you would want the cap exposed. Perhaps if you gave me an example of why this is necessary it would penetrate my thick skull. :)

If the cap was parented and scaled to fit just inside the figure, would you still get the artifacts?

WendyLuvsCatz · June 2019

I did buy PhilW’s Femme Fatale hair and am impressed how it animates

the fact it is a cap means it will work on all my figures, am testing on G8M at the moment

I can live a bit better with Dforce hair being PA only if I can use it on every figure as this can be

hopefully we get a variety of styles in future

PhilW · June 2019

Wendy_Carrara said:

I did buy PhilW’s Femme Fatale hair and am impressed how it animates

the fact it is a cap means it will work on all my figures, am testing on G8M at the moment

I can live a bit better with Dforce hair being PA only if I can use it on every figure as this can be

hopefully we get a variety of styles in future

Thanks Wendy - glad you like it. I can't speak for other PAs but I am certainly planning more styles for the future.

nicstt · June 2019

Looking forward to some (yes some) more hairs Phil.

CauriB · June 2019

Played a bit with animals, cat from the other store and good old Millennium dog. It gets easier after a while, but is a real pain to create.

wheat11283 · June 2019

hello community made several hair attempts on daz dog8 but the hair show in preview but iray and 3d delight renders show no har . is there something extra needed . any info would be helpful thank you.

Leonides02 · June 2019

CauriB said:

Played a bit with animals, cat from the other store and good old Millennium dog. It gets easier after a while, but is a real pain to create.

Really? I'm finding the trial and error to be a bit of a blast.

The tool seems powerful, limited only by my abilities. That's how I like things, personally.

And your cat looks fantastic!

CauriB · June 2019

Leonides02 said:

CauriB said:

Played a bit with animals, cat from the other store and good old Millennium dog. It gets easier after a while, but is a real pain to create.

Really? I'm finding the trial and error to be a bit of a blast.

The tool seems powerful, limited only by my abilities. That's how I like things, personally.

And your cat looks fantastic!

Thank you. The cat took about 2 days, dog only about 1 or two hours, as I now know what to do to speed things up. Will play a bit more today.

Eboshijaana · June 2019

So, with the dforce simulation, I've noticed an interesting behaviour. When starting the simulation, some hairs decide to stick to the ground and, well... I did this with the unedited Lechuza to see if it would behave the same. It does.

RawArt · June 2019

Eboshijaana said:
So, with the dforce simulation, I've noticed an interesting behaviour. When starting the simulation, some hairs decide to stick to the ground and, well... I did this with the unedited Lechuza to see if it would behave the same. It does.

You may have to turn off stuff in your shot when running the simulation.....when it interacts weirdly with something, just turn that off, then simulate and then turn it back on......I had some really weird interactions in one shot i rendered "static cling"

RAMWolff · June 2019

Mattymanx · June 2019

RawArt said:

Eboshijaana said:
So, with the dforce simulation, I've noticed an interesting behaviour. When starting the simulation, some hairs decide to stick to the ground and, well... I did this with the unedited Lechuza to see if it would behave the same. It does.

You may have to turn off stuff in your shot when running the simulation.....when it interacts weirdly with something, just turn that off, then simulate and then turn it back on......I had some really weird interactions in one shot i rendered "static cling"

Such is love! :)

AlmightyQUEST · June 2019

Do you really need to turn it invisible (I assume that is what is meant?) Rather than just turn off visible in simulation? Does that work differently with hair?

PhilW · June 2019

AlmightyQUEST said:
Do you really need to turn it invisible (I assume that is what is meant?) Rather than just turn off visible in simulation? Does that work differently with hair?

I think either should work.

Eboshijaana · June 2019

RawArt said:

Eboshijaana said:
So, with the dforce simulation, I've noticed an interesting behaviour. When starting the simulation, some hairs decide to stick to the ground and, well... I did this with the unedited Lechuza to see if it would behave the same. It does.

You may have to turn off stuff in your shot when running the simulation.....when it interacts weirdly with something, just turn that off, then simulate and then turn it back on......I had some really weird interactions in one shot i rendered "static cling"

Yeah, it isn't a huge issue. Just amusing and good to note for any future fixes. It seems just making the object invisible in simulation is enough.

RawArt · June 2019

PhilW said:

AlmightyQUEST said:
Do you really need to turn it invisible (I assume that is what is meant?) Rather than just turn off visible in simulation? Does that work differently with hair?

I think either should work.

yeah...what he said ;)

3Diva · June 2019

Some quick experiments with some different styles.

Mattymanx · June 2019

Those look really good Diva.

3Diva · June 2019

Mattymanx said:

Those look really good Diva.

Thank you! :D

algovincian · June 2019

They do look really good! You do animals at all?

- Greg

Rashad Carter · June 2019

Divamakeup said:

Some quick experiments with some different styles.

Yes!!!!

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

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