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Alternatives to strand-based hair? Fibermesh? Hair cards?

SelekSelek Posts: 70
in The Commons

I like Daz's strand-based hair, but it's the one feature of Daz that frequently crashes the program on me.  (Daz is otherwise stable for me.)  I also own ZBrush and can make nice Fibermesh hair with it, but that results in high-poly hair that can be unwieldy to manage in Daz, as the program slows down even with lower preview settings.  (One can always hide the hair til render time, I suppose.)  I don't have any experience making hair cards, but I see there are tutorials for making game-ready hair using Fibermesh to generate some aspect of hair cards.  But I'm not creating hair for an animated 3D game; I just want to make pretty still renders, though I suppose at some point I might want to try animating them too.  Is high-poly Fibermesh hair workable in Daz?

Comments

  • SevrinSevrin Posts: 6,313

    You can check out Neftis3D and RedzStudio for the kind of fibremesh hair that works okay in Daz.  I like hair from both vendors, but if you have one character with fibremesh hair and another one with hair of a different sort, it can look odd.  Transmapped hair with or without dForce is most common, though.  How well fibremesh will work depends on your hardware and how elaborate your scenes are, because, as you say, there are quite a few polygons.  For that reason, most of the fibremesh in the market here tends to be of the buzzcut/short/updo variety, or else used for eyebrows.

  • SelekSelek Posts: 70

    Thanks for your reply.  Thanks especially for mentioning RedzStudio and especially Neftis3D, who offers a lot of hair made or "refined" in ZBrush.  Some of Neftis's hair comes with transmaps, but some comes only with texture maps.  For example, https://www.daz3d.com/perfect-wild-curls-for-genesis-8-females just has texture maps.  Why are even these necessary?  For basic coloring, the user can just set the color using Daz's Surfaces controls, such as Diffuse and Specular lighting, yes?  But my guess is that the texture maps define changing color, say from roots to tips.  I haven't gotten to texturing Fibermesh hair yet; I assume it's something I'd do in ZBrush, generating the texture map there for import into Daz?

    I'm especially clueless about transparency maps.  I've searched for tutorials on how to create them, or how to make hair using transmaps, and I haven't found much.  If one is making fiermesh hair, why does one need transmaps at all?  

    I may stick with my fibermesh workflow for now, because I'm getting better at it, and the high-poly counts aren't necessarily a dealkiller yet.  They haven't been a huge problem at render time.  The viewport seems okay so long as I don't turn on the iRay preview.  (I'm not sure hiding the hair makes any difference in viewport speed.  Maybe deleting it, temporarily, would.)

    Anyway, if you or anyone else has advice for me on texturing Fibermesh hair, and on how/whether to create transmaps for it, I'd be very grateful.  Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

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