Calling on UV experts....
RAMWolff
Posts: 10,343
Hi,
I'm making a beard, I'm going about it differently than others, sort of creating my OWN fiber hair since I'm not happy with how fiber hair works for building a nice neat beard (maybe messy and crazy beards but not a well groomed one).. one of the issues I had with the brushes they provide for grooming the fiber hair was that even set to really low power they tended to make a mess. I practiced till I just couldn't any more and I usually pick stuff up pretty quickly once I'm in the know... I know what each one does and yea, for longer hair creation they are great but for short, neat looks.. nope, sorry, just not something I'm willing to work with.
So I've begun the process of building my own beard from a set up to create my own fiber hair. Started out with a single hair, from some polys, shaped, UV Mapped it and then duplicated, merged and kept going... the issue I'm having is that I just want ONE hair as the UV map source. How can, when I'm done with the process, to assign just ONE hair as the main UV mapped hair to affect all the other hairs? I know there must be a way to do this. They do it with the fibermesh hair and I'm sure Alex has a set up in LAMH to achieve this so it must be something that's doable.
Thanks.
Richard
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Comments
I'm not a UV expert but I'd make one strand, UV Map it, make copies, but once you change the goeomery of those copies it's going to change the UV in some way I would think.
what StratDragon says should work. I've seen some modelling tutorials that followed this idea for hair. What program are you using?
It would also work that way even in Hexagon. Make one "hair", uvmap it ... assign the Shading too [unless you want EVERY hair to have its own], then make very many copies.
Arrange them deleting the ones not required but keep one or two "spare" to make more copies from if/as required until the project is more or less done.
In Hexagon one cannot merge anything and keep the uvmaps BUT IF every hair follicle is the exact same name; exporting out the mass; then importing the mass back in should have it coming in as one unit BUT hair follicles and Hexagon seldom work together for long because of the intense amount of memory required. However that trick might work in your program too?
I know the same thing works in blender. Anything that has UV maps, if it is copied, it will keep the same maps. Objects can be joined together into one object, no problem.
The problem with hex is as mentioned, but also it breaks UV's doing random things from my experience. So you could get unlucky with some of the hairs if you select them wrong, which is what happened to me LOL. But yes, should work in Hex, export them out without welding and it should be OK.
I probably went about in the wrong way then. In ZBrush, my modeling app of choice, I would "duplicate" the hair and then merge it... so that would require a re UV mapping of that new layer I created. I guess what I will need to do then is just figure out how to make a copy within that same layer, which I'm not sure how to do and have that other hair auto masked so it stays in place.... Grrrrrr...
Edited to add, the 5 hairs that I have merged into one layer actually UV out very straight up and down so may keep that and work from there as that will give me an advantage for making multicolored hair strands...
This might help you with zbrush.... when you get ready to merge two hairs (assuming you mean merging subtools), there is a button under merge that tells you to keep the uvs. Otherwise, the merge dumps the uvs and requires new ones. I learned this the hard way making clothing, lol
Thanks so much. I'll look for that button. That will be helpful!
If you want to try traditional fibermesh again, try using the move elastic brush on multiple hairs and move topographical on single hairs. ignore the grooming brushes.
I don't totally know what your ideal well groomed beard looks like, but this was about a five minute effort. I started off using the shiny hair from the light box, reduced it to just three segments long and three polys around. cranked the length and number of hairs way way down, and tweaked the hair flow very breifly using the move elastic brush.
Looks good. Some of my attempts look great in ZBrush but when saved out as an obj, brought into DS they look bad with a shader or texture.... I don't want to give up on the IDEA of fibermesh but it just seems that the trick to grooming the hair and somehow keeping the luster to it evades me.... Here is the beard I made conformed to Dusk with two of my Bruno morphs mixed and an expression morph or two mixed and applied. Yea, that was fun figuring out how to get expression morphs to work but thanks to some advice I got it working....
There are 4 lights in this scene, only one with shadows enabled... the beard has a mixture of a shader and texture with the specular set to shine individual hairs on the beard. Do you see any of that? Nope, flat. I even tried Cath's free hair shader from a recent freebie, looks great on her hair but on my beard it looks really off, like the beard is TOO solid or something and it's not... From my good attempts to a great looking beard to a flat lifeless looking beard in DS... it's a bit defeating.....
Richard, it's nothing with the beard. It's the sahder...basically, what is on it (default, I'm assuming?) is totally wrong. Minimally you need a really 'tweaked' UberSurface or a 'real' hair shader (Garibaldi/LAMH shaders) to look really good...or to really play with the default shader. I mean really play...change values in small increments and do a ton of test renders.
Did all that till I was blue in the face. Trust me... tiny increments. I'd get the hair sort of standing out then I'd apply an open mouth, as you see above and the shader someone just stopped looking sort of good.
Poking my nose in here ,but I read something about applying a transparence map to fiber hair to make it finer and less solid ,don't know how to do it myself but maybe that is what you need to get the look you are going for.
Hi Carrie,
The point of Fiber hair is to avoid transparency maps since they slow down render times. But I thank you for the suggestion!