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well in any case I'm glad I happened to see this post, I've never heard of this trick before! thanks!
Oh, I remembered another trick. If you simulate with the Geometry Editor tool selected, the hair seems to lose its baked in stiffness and will drape a lot. That's really the best way to make upside down morphs or droopy wet looks, I think. You don't even need a modeler for this. Just simulate, export and import to morph loader pro (or use MorphMaster, which is fabulous).
Edit: And always select another tool, like the Node Selection Tool, before Iray rendering. The dForce hairs won't render all the strands with the Geometry Editor (or Mesh Grabber, etc.) tools selected.
immensely helpful!
e: what a difference
iray curves is a way of rendering splines/curves in iray, that's far from being the right term. Any spline will render as an iray curve by default now and thus anyone can make iray curves.
these two seem the most logical. Maybe a 3rd for Editable SBH if it can be edited in the SBH Editor.
I usually lurk...but this is really a great conversation. I must have overlooked these conversations before....
In C4D, the Hair object is what tells the program how to convert the splines into renderable geometry, and you can only edit hair with dedicated hair tools, not normal geometry tools (unless that's changed since 2023). Similarly, Iray curves/SBH/dForce Hair is not "geometry" until it's rendered.
Actually, dForce hair predated Iray curves, and still works without them if you're using a different render engine. I've been banging the drum about Daz's bad naming decisions regarding dForce hair, but calling them "Iray curves" would arguably be MORE confusing.
According to the messages I see from DS, when I export the dForce SBH to OBJ, the OBj is geometry. When I import the OBJ to Blender, I can edit it with Edit mode and Sculpt mode. I can select vertices, grab and move them, scale them, etc., like any other geometry I import. So I think they are really geometry once exported and handled in a modeling application.
Who knew Linet Hair could be so varied? Here I turned G9 upside down and simulated the hair a couple different ways and created morphs from them. I also exported the hair to Blender and grabbed the ends and scaled them out to flare the hair a little. I also simulated a droopy style with G9 right side up. I combined all these morphs I made and simulated again for this dancing pose. I can't really even recognize the original Linet hair style here anymore. I'm going to buy more Toyen hair!
There's a debate to be had about whether splines are "geometry" in the same way that polygons are. In most programs, with most render engines, splines won't be visible in a render unless you act on them in some way, whether by meshing them, converting them to hair like in C4D, or some such. As I said, C4D even distinguishes between normal splines and hair. So yes, DS is outputting points and vertices when you export dForce hair, but I would quibble on that meaning that it's exporting the hair "geometry".
Well, you'll have to take that up with Daz3D. It is their progress message that says they are "building geometry structure" and "saving geometry". I don't have a horse in this race.
Not everything comes out as anticipated. I'm not sure what caused this, but it is still kind of interesting.
it is visible in Carrara's vertex room but has 0 vertices
it has points and lines
so as far as Carrara is concerned it is not geometry and I cannot render it there even though it imports rigged even
I have tried many options which is a shame as something is there
it honestly would probably not take much to enable Carrara to see it as hair but beyond my scope
Yeah while you can convert splines into hair objects and back, that's not what I showed a screenshot of, and you can edit those splines in my screenshot as they are, with the standard geometry tools, and export them back out in the same state. I didn't bother to convert them to hair objects because I'm pretty certain this will wreck the vertex order on re-export and as discussed before, you have no way to re-import the spline geometry without the proprietary importer. I don't know why people are dug in about whether splines are geometry or not, you can read the plaintext OBJ file and see vertex data on exporting curve based hair from D|S. It's ... geometry! It doesn't have faces, but it's still geometry.
e: still not useful to me though as Cinema R18's OBJ exporter won't write out splines/"lines" even though it will read them in, and Spanki's good old OBJ plugin doesn't work with my version, but I'll give FBX a shot (normally I pass all my geometry from C4D to D|S in FBX and it works well)
e: might be time to start learning blender, I'll never be able to afford to update cinema again
e: here's a spline object exported as FBX and imported to DS, came in as a faceless curve (that's promising):
if you can get it into another app as splines, then you can sweep those splines and make polys that can be rendered. this will probably be super heavy to work with because as I said, this will triple or quadruple the vertex count (the sweep polys if you use triangle or square - more if you use something smoother) and you can work with materials to get something in the ballpark.
If FBX gives you trouble, why not just use OBJ?
Cinema R18's OBJ exporter will read splines in, but won't write them out again (reading the exported OBJ file it contains no vertex data). Also the R18 FBX exporter seems to be having a hard time writing the 1.3 million vertex hair I'm working with back out to FBX, it's sitting at 0% for some time but I'll leave it alone and see if it either fails or succeeds or what.
e: the Cinema OBJ importer has an option for "lines", but the exporter does not (although the FBX exporter has "curves" and seems to work for small splines)
e: that full FBX export was taking so long and I wasn't sure if it was hung or not so I interrupted it, I managed to export a 100k vertex part of the original 1.3 million vert hair and while that took quite a long time (something like 10 minutes) it completed OK and re-imported back into D|S, so trying again with the whole model with a silly obvious morph applied and will see if it can be imported as a morph target.
I have exported them as mesh and yes are horrendous
but
Carrara hair it'self is a type of spline just not user facing
Philemo, one of our third party developers made a plugin to convert those hairs to strips or tubes
so as I said, I suspect Carrara is capable of rendering it if it could be made to see it as hair
sadly Philemo hasn't been heard from for 3+ years now
BTW Poser hair too is a type of Spline and there is a hair converter for that too
If you export the hair from D|S as OBJ format (make sure you have "Write Polylines" checked) and then import it into Carrara what do you get? Anything?
e: these are my export options I use to go to Cinema (i.e., these get splines out of D|S hair and into Cinema)
busy rendering so cannot look but Carrara can actually load the duf files which are polylines (with weightmapping if rigged)
and yes can import obj too as strips, triangular tubes or just polylines depending on settings
the latter not much use though as I said, the former way too big to be useful
this is not something someone who is not familiar with the Carrara SDK can likely help with and that includes me
I know absolutely nothing about coding either except Carrara apparently uses C++ and according to Philemo much is not revealed in the SDK including how it's hair works but DAZ added it so they would know
but
again no longer in development
anyway my Carrara tangent not really topical to this thread, was just musing about what could have been
I can grow style and simulate my own hair in Carrara and do, on everything
clothing, body, head, other objects like cars
cannot type without typos though
Sorry, I know it's super frustrating to see this stuff in an almost-useful state for editing/customization and nope, just a massive waste of time and focus.
Barbult - is there a chance of showing the obj output of one simple curve/spline shown from in an obj file exported from DS? My DS PC is not working at the moment, but it's possible that splines could be converted to facets outside a traditional modeller. Paul Bourke may give enough info here: https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/obj/ to allow it to be converted.
Regards,
Richard
I let the Cinema side export run for two hours and gave up, whether it works or not I am not interested enough to give it that much time between each attempt.
Honestly, Ai can animate any hair far more realisticly than Dforce ever will
I still do 3D rendering slightly more than I do Ai, though my YouTube channel uploads might suggest the opposite simply because Ai takes very little time.
however if DAZ is going to gatekeep functionalty and Ai animation of images is getting cheaper each week, well, I don't feel guilt about animating stuff I render myself at all, it's not stealing others art if it's using the actual 3D art I rendered
I do do generative Ai images too but refuse to pay for that
(because it's trained on others art)
however, I will pay to animate renders and my photographs
most of that is actually somewhat more ethnically trained too
particulary the Tencent owned Hunyuan based stuff, they actually own the games and 3D anime stuff they trained it on
This thread is really fascinating, a lot of different subjects with the common denominator dForce hair. Read all posts with much interest! - Concerning AI animation, I didn't know about that before, and it sounds quite cool as long as it's ethically trained / using your own stuff. But I'd just miss that staring at my screen with bated breath and clenched teeth, muttering: Come on ... oh do come on ... don't explode on me now ... And if it does work, it's such a wonder to see, every time, to me at least. Like I made it come alive.
I am confused. After reading the first page of this forum thread I opened https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-fv-dramatic-side-sweep-hair-for-genesis-9 thinking that it wasn't able to be simulated and wasn't a curve product. But I found that yes, it is able to be simulated and has curves and used Omni shaders.
So was all the fuss because the artist didn't show it in a variety of wind-blown styles?
I am posting this because this thread almost discouraged me to not buy a product I was interested in and to avoid an artist I had not tried before. I took a chance because I could use the style, regardless of how it moved. It is nice since it does.
if you like how it looks in its initial state then you made a good purchase, I don't think anyone is trying to discourage you from getting something you think looks good.
i mean the OP is literally an invitation for people to post what you have posted.
I'm confused by the question, Richard. What is the goal for creating facets from curves outside of Daz Studio? You can do that in Daz Studio with the Line Tessellation parameter.
Edit: I attempted to attach a curve here. I exported a dForce Hair to Blender and deleted all but a little strand. I don't know if that is what you need.