What are your strategies for handling strand-based hair lighting/coloring?
joshua.r.fletcher
Posts: 29
I feel like it's really challenging to get any sort of consistency with strand-based hair colors, particularly with red hair and dark black hair. I want realism in my hair, not 'hollywood', for what I am doing in this project. For a given specific render, you can get the settings right, but if you need to do other angles, move them around, new scenes, etc. you're playing with all the sliders and settings to get it right for those. For example, I have a red-hair strandbased hair that looks fine from a given angle. Move the camera maybe 30 degrees right, and the hair's blond. Move it 30 degrees left, it's "red hair concentrate", and you're back to playing with shaders, tessellation sides, etc. What are your strategies for strand-based hair?
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How are you lighting the scene? Hair can easily be affected by lighting, even in the physical world, so if the light set up is pretty "unphysical" the hair may well look odd.
Hello there,
it would be helpful if you could provide us with screenshots of the issues you are having with your hair.
Toyen
It's pretty universal in any location and with any standbased hair but I had an extreme example yesterday before I made any slider changes. From the side and the front, it looks completely different. The only thing I did was move the camera.
Hair: https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-strand-based-messy-low-ponytail-hair-for-genesis-9.
Location: https://www.daz3d.com/attic-bedroom-2
HDRI is shown in the third picture with a different hair (I don't remember which HDRI I used).
This was during a character creation so I hadn't changed anything about the scene.
I have the hair and the environment.
So I loaded the room, Victoria and the hair. I gave the hair a red tone. And posed Victoria (she will be happier to work with if posed
)
I used the default HDRI, as I don't see the HDRI will do much difference, unless you have one that can shine in during one of the windows.
I would usually have added more lights, but didnt for the test.
Three angles, and I don't see mush difference.
So what explains the drastic difference in mine? I did not add any lights or anything either.
How did you get the hair to stay that consistent color? All strand-based hairs turn all colors for me depending on angle, etc. Also, what hex color did you use for the hair root and tip color? That hair color is exactly what I want but I don't seem to be able to find all the magic settings to make it happen.
I don't know, I can't remember having seen that.
Just to check, which shader is listed in surfaces for the strand based hair itself - not the cap?
It uses omnihair. I did a simplistic example here. Default HDRI. Standing in A-pose in front of the bed. Loaded the hair and changed to its copper red material as an example. It looks like she's wearing a red racoon on her head.
Usually the best way I know to get any kind of consistency is to increase Tessellation to 4 or 5 but it tends to make it look dyed.
I get this with any strand-based hair, and I assume there's some kind of magical set of settings to fix it that I don't know of, otherwise I fail to see the point of strand-based hair except for maybe model-style posing.
Tesselation for any Omnihair must be set to 0. That it is designed to.
Thanks. Do you know how else then to prevent the inconsistent racoon-like coloring? Another way is to add more light, which is fine, except in the world I am building, electricity is extremely scarce and a lot of areas are intentionally going to be not well lit.
Renders usually renders best if there is sufficient light in all corners, else you will get noise. For that I would suggest to make sure that there is enough light and then adjust Exposure Value in Render Settings > Tone Mapping, to make it darker (that was how it traditionally was done in films and probably still are).
Hello there,
that is indeed a strange issue. It looks like you have changed the color to blonde which I assume you have not.
The best you can do is
1. A s somebody already mentioned, make sure that tessalation is set to 0 on both render as well as viewport.
2. Make sure you have the omnihair shader properly installed.
3. To make the hair color more consistent, you could increase the Hair Dye Weight and adjust the hair dye color.
Hope some of this helps.
Toyen
I considered all that and am using Tesselation at 0 going forward, but I think I've had an insight as to what is going on. If I have 0 Daz lights (pointlight, spotlight, etc.) in the scene, and am relying on environment light and HDRI only, this blowout happens. If I have one of those, even if I have it turned off, it doesn't happen nearly as much. In these two pictures, the only difference is I have a pointlight behind the wall (not even in the room), turned off. Everything else is the same. There's a signficant difference in the racoon effect.
ChatGPT tells me this is what is going on with that.
When you add any photometric light (point, spot, distant) into a scene, Iray switches from pure environment lighting mode to mixed lighting mode.
Here’s why that changes your exposure:
What’s happening
With only the HDRI (environment) active, Iray auto-normalizes exposure to the HDRI’s intensity.
When you add a pointlight, Iray changes how it calculates tone mapping because it assumes you now have scene lights contributing.
The renderer starts balancing exposure for the brightest single light source it sees — and photometric lights have a real-world lumen output by default.
If that light is weak, hidden, or far away, the HDRI gets dimmed relative to the exposure curve to “balance” everything.
This may be a good part of the solution here because the scene lighting also looks far more realistic with this pointlight present but hidden in some other testing I just did (namely, a HDRI going into this room with no artifical lights on, simulating a room without electricity getting light only from the outside).