Hair Shaders?
JOdel
Posts: 6,322
I know there are some out there. Like the Fairy Hair shaders over on RDNA, and there are the UberHair shaders here. But I'm not sure that UberHair does what I want, and I know the other doesn't.
Hellfish Studio has his series of Genesis races over on Rendo, and not too long ago he came out with Dwarves. The package includes a couple of splendid braided dwarf beards. Unfortunately, to me, they do not look like they have the texture of actual hair. They are too smooth, and to my eye resemble molded plastic. There is only so much that changing the default lighting model in the surface tab can do. The surface of the hair simply doesn't convince me that it's hair. Unless I'm using it for a 'toon, and I was hoping to use it for something other than a 'toon.
I would suppose that a shader with a good strong bump map or displacement might be able to add the texture which isn't in the geometry, because that seems to be standard operating procedure. But I do not know what shaders out there would be appropriate for adding a hair-like texture to those beards.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm more interested in natural colors at the moment rather than fantasy.
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
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
For transmapped hair, there really isn't anything that can be done, other than 'tweaking' the settings (bump/displacement) and having high quality, very detailed transmaps and displacement maps that were laid down as displacement/bump maps from the start, not desaturated diffuse maps.
UberHair is basically customizing the Uber surface shader to maximize what it can for transmapped hair.
The best hair is going to be the curve based solutions from something like LAMH or Garibaldi. Poser's dynamic hair comes in somewhere around there, too. Strand/fibre based hair can be good, but is very 'heavy' due to the fact that it is actual 'geometry' for each strand.
Some of the add-on textures for various hairs are improvements, as they include finer/more detailed maps and/or bump/displacement maps...
Well the thing is that I don't think it *is* transmapped hair. It certainly doesn't look like it. It looks like a solid model. But I just dug through the texture folder and there are maps, so I'll try upping the settings. and see whether that helps. It needs a wider range of colors, though.
Oh well, At some point I suppose I'll figure it out.
If the hair is looking like solid tubes using uberhair to add anisotropic specularity, so that you got the effect of highlights following the line of the hair, might help. It does, however, depend on the hair being consistently aligned on the UV template as it uses the axes to determine which way the highlights should stretch.