Tutorial: Creating realistic Carrara hair for animations and still renders

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  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139
    PhilW said:

    You can't fool us with another name change, Wendy!

    "See me swish my hula butt!"

    A user wants a hula skirt for DAZ studio 

    you might need to whip up a Dforce hair one for all figures

    it could grow off a belt you can fit to any figure 

    Wendy - you'll note that this was the inspiration for my Hula Outfit product launched late last year!

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139

    Wow

    I've gone through a LOT of tests and experiments since putting up that video of tests not long ago. I do Rosie's hair entirely different now on my new machine - sort of.

    The hair shader is nearly the same, just a few tweaks. The way I layer the hair is incredibly different, however, as I now feel like I've finally unlocked the door to making ultra huge curly hair... in layers!

    The tests I've shown in this video was a nightmare. Not the hair, but trying to work with it (Carrara in general) on this under-powered laptop. It was horrible, but at least I was able to render some tests of curly hair with some success. It's not just curls that can mess things up (making the hair jitter, even when not moving), but any bit of waviness if the hair a really long was also doing this... or was it?

    One thing I've learned when using dynamic hair in a scene is to make sure that nothing else is set to collide with hairs, even if it's nowhere near the hair. Even skydomes... well especially skydomes, I should say will cause dramatic catastrophe.

    Anyway, in that video I was using custom mesh collision objects to shape the hair - very much like PhilW's face shield. It's really kinda neat how we can manipulate the hair with invisible low-poly mesh. I'm using Genesis and have tried using various things as the collision object(s), like Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD), for example, which does work but I've found that I prefer the results I get from simple low-poly shapes parented to the figure. Even better, each of these individual colliders can have different settings applied to them - friction and bounce, for example. Friction is really nice on shoulders, but it will cause hair to stick to a face shield! LOL

    So I've got a nice setup of collision objects parented, but instead of shaping the hair with collision mesh, I'm using various Point Forces which are also parented to parts of the figure. To make this work for animated scenes, I used multiple hair objects on the same figure - in the same place. Light, frilly wisps kept close to the head and neck, long flows of hair down the back, and several iterations of full hair styles covering it all, each draped and simulated with different amounts of pressure from the rig of forces, so the final (outer) layer has all of the various lengths I need for the wild lion mane of hair I've ended up with. 

    Along with a crazy translucency kick I've been on lately, it's now taking much longer to render just Rosie by herself - but it's totally worth it. I can animate her with the hair hidden, and then drape and simulate each layer individually with the forces set for each layer, and it doesn't mess with the layers already simulated.

    So now I'm saving these animates/simulated scenes several times until the test renders become real renders, then do a final save. At this point I can build a scene and bring her in when it's time to render. There's actually a lot more to this workflow than that simle description, which I'll be publishing to the web soon in a much more complete, tutorial-like method once I get the movie released. But I've been so happy with how things are going, but bummed that I can't really show it off yet - driving me nuts on that front! LOL

    Dart is much easier. I've given him Mon-Chevalier hair and then used dynamic Carrara hair to make it a bit longer and dynamic. Looks cool! New Rosie looks fantastic, I think! Tiny little thing with this gigantic mop! :) Love it!!!

    Hey, cheers all! I'll try and sneak a still render out to show you.

    Some really interesting details there, Dart, I will look forward to seeing the end results!

  • PhilW said:
    PhilW said:

    You can't fool us with another name change, Wendy!

    "See me swish my hula butt!"

    A user wants a hula skirt for DAZ studio 

    you might need to whip up a Dforce hair one for all figures

    it could grow off a belt you can fit to any figure 

    Wendy - you'll note that this was the inspiration for my Hula Outfit product launched late last year!

    heart

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106
    PhilW said:

    Wow

    I've gone through a LOT of tests and experiments since putting up that video of tests not long ago. I do Rosie's hair entirely different now on my new machine - sort of.

    The hair shader is nearly the same, just a few tweaks. The way I layer the hair is incredibly different, however, as I now feel like I've finally unlocked the door to making ultra huge curly hair... in layers!

    The tests I've shown in this video was a nightmare. Not the hair, but trying to work with it (Carrara in general) on this under-powered laptop. It was horrible, but at least I was able to render some tests of curly hair with some success. It's not just curls that can mess things up (making the hair jitter, even when not moving), but any bit of waviness if the hair a really long was also doing this... or was it?

    One thing I've learned when using dynamic hair in a scene is to make sure that nothing else is set to collide with hairs, even if it's nowhere near the hair. Even skydomes... well especially skydomes, I should say will cause dramatic catastrophe.

    Anyway, in that video I was using custom mesh collision objects to shape the hair - very much like PhilW's face shield. It's really kinda neat how we can manipulate the hair with invisible low-poly mesh. I'm using Genesis and have tried using various things as the collision object(s), like Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD), for example, which does work but I've found that I prefer the results I get from simple low-poly shapes parented to the figure. Even better, each of these individual colliders can have different settings applied to them - friction and bounce, for example. Friction is really nice on shoulders, but it will cause hair to stick to a face shield! LOL

    So I've got a nice setup of collision objects parented, but instead of shaping the hair with collision mesh, I'm using various Point Forces which are also parented to parts of the figure. To make this work for animated scenes, I used multiple hair objects on the same figure - in the same place. Light, frilly wisps kept close to the head and neck, long flows of hair down the back, and several iterations of full hair styles covering it all, each draped and simulated with different amounts of pressure from the rig of forces, so the final (outer) layer has all of the various lengths I need for the wild lion mane of hair I've ended up with. 

    Along with a crazy translucency kick I've been on lately, it's now taking much longer to render just Rosie by herself - but it's totally worth it. I can animate her with the hair hidden, and then drape and simulate each layer individually with the forces set for each layer, and it doesn't mess with the layers already simulated.

    So now I'm saving these animates/simulated scenes several times until the test renders become real renders, then do a final save. At this point I can build a scene and bring her in when it's time to render. There's actually a lot more to this workflow than that simle description, which I'll be publishing to the web soon in a much more complete, tutorial-like method once I get the movie released. But I've been so happy with how things are going, but bummed that I can't really show it off yet - driving me nuts on that front! LOL

    Dart is much easier. I've given him Mon-Chevalier hair and then used dynamic Carrara hair to make it a bit longer and dynamic. Looks cool! New Rosie looks fantastic, I think! Tiny little thing with this gigantic mop! :) Love it!!!

    Hey, cheers all! I'll try and sneak a still render out to show you.

    Some really interesting details there, Dart, I will look forward to seeing the end results!

    Since I have a bust drum schedule for the rest of the month, I've decided to take a break and render out a press release of Rosie's new dynamic hair. What fun that is so far!!! :)

  • SileneUKSileneUK Posts: 1,969

    Look forward to that Dart.  Back to your first post about hair sticking to face shield.... that's what happens in real life when going through action moves, running, etc. You hair DOES stick to your face! Only in a perfect world does it flow and bounce without getting in your eyes or sticking to you as you pant and sweat! (Whilst running, not doing other stuff devil )

    laugh Silene

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106
    edited February 2020
    SileneUK said:

    Look forward to that Dart.  Back to your first post about hair sticking to face shield.... that's what happens in real life when going through action moves, running, etc. You hair DOES stick to your face! Only in a perfect world does it flow and bounce without getting in your eyes or sticking to you as you pant and sweat! (Whilst running, not doing other stuff devil )

    laugh Silene

    Right! My head collision meshes have a default friction of 65% with very little bounce. When she's wet I can crank the friction up to 100% if I want.

    The "Face Shield" is a tool we use to keep the hair from annoyingly blocking the facial features when we just don't want it to. Saves us from a LOT of headaches.

    Warning - a Face Shield can also have a tendency to make hair sims look funny as the hair parks itself on the edge of the shield. My shield is a squashed spherical(ish) shape to allow hair to behave somewhat naturally - only an arc of the sphere touches the face. To help keep the hair from wanting to interact too much with the shield I have an inverted black hole of only gentle force inside the shield - gently pushing outward without density, bounce nor friction - because it's a force, not a mesh.

    So I can turn the Face Shield off (it's off by default) but leave that gentle force alive to have a gentle breeze, if you like, blowing steadily at the face. 

    The big thing here is to tweak all of these things to cater to each individual animated sequence to get the hair to behave "the way I want" it to behave. I have my setup honed to the point where my usual values in each of these elements works 'out-of-the-box' for Rosie's Ginormous hair. Dart's hair requires very little effort. Just pose out his animation, run the hair sim, done. Rosie's has been a challenge from the very beginning.

    Something that helped me to decide how "Real World" to go or not to go came from watching the amazing movie, Alita Battle Angel. Weta Digital outdid themselves to make one of the finest digital people in the history of movies - so far. I watched it a few times over paying closer attention to what the hair is doing. It's actually quite controlled - yet dynamic. Very seldom does it go into her face and there's a big reason for that - they need the audience to see her face. Yet the dynamics that are used still sell the effect as real hair.

    (in the gif, she's munching on an orange slice for the first time)

    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • SileneUKSileneUK Posts: 1,969

    I also assumed you wanted Rosie's face to show all the time as well, hence my comment!  I had not seen Alita before. Those big eyes look so natural for being big eyes!!!  Mouth movements are so natural, too.

    yesSilene

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106
    SileneUK said:

    I also assumed you wanted Rosie's face to show all the time as well, hence my comment!  I had not seen Alita before. Those big eyes look so natural for being big eyes!!!  Mouth movements are so natural, too.

    yesSilene

    Her Irises alone have more geometry than all of Golem from Lord of the Rings!

    I failed to see any promotion for this film before it came out. I saw it on Vudu when it first came out on Blu Ray,  but just skimmed over it. I go there to watch movies that I own or free ones with ads. It went on sale and the Digital UHD (stream now) + Blu Ray (sent via mail) was the same price as any lesser option, so I bought that - or rather, Rosie bought it for me. "This might make for some excellent animation inspiration", I thought to myself. I was so right!

    It comes with a virtual Ton of extra special features behind the scenes. They explained that "Performance Capture" (where they use two HD cameras on a face boom to record a bunch of emotion/facial change dots on the actor's face - separate process from the usual Motion Capture) only works when you have talented artists interpreting the information to the CG character - meaning that they not only use the performance capture data, but also tweak via morphs. 

    That gif above is part of an amazing scene where just eats an orange for the first time. The interaction between live actors and her being fully CG is absolutely stunning, which immediately paves the way for the audience to forget that she's not 'real'. 

    Here's a very short demo if some of the amazing content that comes as extras (just under 4 minutes)

  • SileneUKSileneUK Posts: 1,969

    In sci-fi is this why I don't mind the uncanny valley as that is the goal maybe of a master class Android borg thingy? 

    cheeky  Silene

  • TangoAlphaTangoAlpha Posts: 4,584

    I saw a guy from WETA the other day explain that now they've added an extra stage into the process. So instead of going straight from Mocap -> Digital Creature, they now go Mocap -> Digital Actor -> Digital Creature. So in the case of the Hulk during Endgame, then went from Mocap to digital Mark Ruffalo, and then to digital Hulk. The extra stage lets them see any issues created by the mocap process, and better match the actor's performance.

  • SileneUKSileneUK Posts: 1,969
    edited February 2020

    More Battle Angel... I skipped around to focus on the facial action. Absolutely amazing!!  heartSilene

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsZHBHqR3rs

    Post edited by SileneUK on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106

    I saw a guy from WETA the other day explain that now they've added an extra stage into the process. So instead of going straight from Mocap -> Digital Creature, they now go Mocap -> Digital Actor -> Digital Creature. So in the case of the Hulk during Endgame, then went from Mocap to digital Mark Ruffalo, and then to digital Hulk. The extra stage lets them see any issues created by the mocap process, and better match the actor's performance.

    That's exactly what they did for Alita. All MoCap was adjusted to the digital double of Rosa Salazar (Actress), even MoCap performed by other people. Then they could make a better translation from digital Rosa to Alita, whose digital features were incredibly similar.

    Just watching Rosa talk in interviews and such really helps to illustrate why Robert (Director) was so happy to have found her for the part. Like the way the guy from Weta explains - her muscles fire in very expressive ways, much moreso than the average actor/person. He made (I can't remember the number, but I think it was in the one hundred seventies) morphs for what happens when these muscles 'fire'. Pretty cool stuff.

    So I have nearly all of the facial expression morphs that I have for V4 (along with expansions, Reby, TheGirl, etc., I have quite a lot), Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 F & M (I have a lot of expansions for Genesis 1 and 2) loaded into my Rosie 5 characters. I've removed just about all other morphs that I own for Genesis, except for ones that I thought I might need through shaping or animation. With Genesis Generation X2, I've included morphforms from V4++ as well as the Genesis 2 versions for added flexibility. Although I have individual morphs from Genesis 2 Female that will work, I'm really glad that I included things like "Inhale" from V4++ as well as a bunch of S4 shaping goodness, like neck details, sternum and such. TheGirl 4 came with some really exaggerated expressions that I love having onboard, even though I barely move that dial! LOL

    Some of Thorne's custom face shapes also give me the ability to get some fun mouth movements through mouth shape morphs, dialing them positive and negative in subtle increments back and forth. 

    The current Rosie I'm animating is:

    • Genesis 1 Basic Female (all Basic Female morphs turned off)

    Head

    • Keiko 6 Head 
    • Girl 6 Head
    • Jazlyn Head (Genesis 1) 
    • Evolutions (Genesis 1) Head details
    • V4 Shapes ++ (many small details dailed in slightly)
    • V4, G4, Reby 4 and custom Expressions
    • V5, All SimonWM and Daz3d Expressions for Genesis 1 as well as shape expansions by Thorne
    • V6, Teen Judy 6, All SimonWM and Daz3d Genesis 2 Female, MORE for Genesis 2 Male Expressions as well as shape expansions by Thorne

    Body

    • Genesis 2 Female
    • Gia 6
    • Aiko 6
    • Keiko 6
    • Evolution Morphs for both Genesis 1 and 2 Female
    • V4 Shapes ++, S4Petite (many small details dailed in slightly)

    Utility

    • PokeAway for both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 Female
    • Clothing Breast Fixes for Genesis 2 Female

    With this latest version, I've refined what was no longer in the data/morphs folder when I loadd Genesis Basic Female into Carrara, which has become a real treat to work with. It's so easy to remeber now where to go for what - and just which letters are needed to quickly get what I need.

    I have all of the Genesis 1 clones made for all previous generations and have been having huge success with the older products since they include So Many More morphs than I've been seeing on Genesis clothing.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106
    SileneUK said:

    More Battle Angel... I skipped around to focus on the facial action. Absolutely amazing!!  heartSilene

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsZHBHqR3rs

    heart

    ...and check out those teeth!!!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106

    Just buy the Blu Ray! You know you want to! heart

  • mindsongmindsong Posts: 1,693
    edited February 2020

    Those teeth/expressions are mind-blowing. wow.

    --ms

    Post edited by mindsong on
  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139

    How long before we get motion capture and expression capture in Daz Studio?!!

  • PhilW said:

    How long before we get motion capture and expression capture in Daz Studio?!!

    when Philemo solves his issues with the Carrara SDK I guess

    he apparently can get it to work in DAZ studio from what I read

  • PhilW said:

    How long before we get motion capture and expression capture in Daz Studio?!!

    when Philemo solves his issues with the Carrara SDK I guess

    he apparently can get it to work in DAZ studio from what I read

    You're right.

    SDK problems are solved. Expression capture works for the most part and transfer to facial morphs also (at least for Genesis 1).

    The transfer uses a DUF file that can be saved and imported into Studio.

    I am now in the tweaking part. I'll soon start a new thread to share where I am and request some help.

     

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139

    Wow - that sounds like a brilliant development!

  • wow exciting times yes but of course the DAZ studio users will only be interested if it uses genesis 8 devil

    I use  1&2 in Carrara and admit I have not even installed Misty's characters on my new computer yet blush

    I do import 3&8 from iClone as FBX though sometimes

  • PhilW said:

    Wow - that sounds like a brilliant development!

    You know the quote of Newton about "standing on the shoulders of giants" wink. The real intelligence is from an open source project named OpenFace V2.

    What I did was just interfacing it, interpreting the results and matching it to existing morphs.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106
    PhilW said:

    Wow - that sounds like a brilliant development!

    You know the quote of Newton about "standing on the shoulders of giants" wink. The real intelligence is from an open source project named OpenFace V2.

    What I did was just interfacing it, interpreting the results and matching it to existing morphs.

    The fact that "You Did It" is genius enough in my book! :)

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 37,713
    edited February 2020

    Philemo, I think you should give being a PA a shot myself yes

    Post edited by WendyLuvsCatz on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,106

    Wow Philemo, that is exciting news! Do you know what sort of recording equipment is needed? Black dots on the face with a titanium boom?

  • Wow Philemo, that is exciting news! Do you know what sort of recording equipment is needed? Black dots on the face with a titanium boom?

    You don't need markers. In good lighting condition, I have pretty good results with my webcam (1280x720 pixels). Whats is really important is lighting conditions. I've got pretty good results with profesionnal pictures in lower resolutions.

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,139
    PhilW said:

    Wow - that sounds like a brilliant development!

    You know the quote of Newton about "standing on the shoulders of giants" wink. The real intelligence is from an open source project named OpenFace V2.

    What I did was just interfacing it, interpreting the results and matching it to existing morphs.

    Still very clever and a great development. But Wendy is right, you could probably make big bucks if you could hook it up to G8 figures in Daz Studio.

  • REIVAXREIVAX Posts: 70
    edited February 2020

    Hello

    you can do things like that

    i do some mistake in compilation. i wait my son (he is devellopper at Capgemini) for correct me.

    Steve Cox longtime ago

    Post edited by REIVAX on
  • REIVAX said:

    Hello

     

    i do some mistake in compilation. i wait my son (he is devellopper at Capgemini) for correct me.

    Thank you for the link to FACSVATAR. 

    I'll have a look to see how they've solved issues that are bothering me.

  • REIVAXREIVAX Posts: 70
    edited February 2020

    Hello Philippe

    attention les librairie sont lourdes. du coup. j'utilise google colab ou docker. peut etre la mon probleme.

    si vous avez du temps.jeter un coup d'oeil a MMD openpose .ça marche.je voulait changer le bvh obtenu pour daz mais je coince dans le csv json;ce n'est pas urgent plus d'un an que je cherche.

    googlised

    if you have time.take a look at MMD openpose. it works.i wanted to change the bvh obtained for daz but i stuck in the csv json; it is not urgent more than a year that i seek.

    Amities

     

    PS.:https://github.com/miu200521358

      https://qiita.com/miu200521358/items/fb0a7bcf2764d7797e26

    Post edited by REIVAX on
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