Hair products - simple explanation needed

Comments

• felis Posts: 5,721

  September 20 edited September 20

  The classic way of making hair is haircards, i.e. strips of polygons, and then add an opacity map to it so it looks like hair. For a full hair you will have many strips.

  Fibermesh hair (I think it can only be made in ZBrush) was to my knowledge only used limited, but especially to brows, beards etc.

  The newest hair is strandbased hair (SBH) which consist of a vertex rows, i.e. without any actual volume. When it was new you used Tesselation to make geometry usually only at render time. NVidia has come up with a newer shader (Omnihair) that can give volume with Tesselation 0. SBH has the potential of using dForce if it is made by Daz PAs. Mortal users can also create SBH, but it can not use dForce, and behaves a little weird, as you must not parent the user SBH to the character.

  Post edited by felis on September 20
• lilweep Posts: 2,740

  September 20 edited September 20

  fibermesh is just polygonal hair. It is made of polygons... but the polygons are tubes. So it can morph just like any other geometry if the vendor decided they would make it do that.  Fibermesh usually is very demanding on your PC because it requires a lot of geometry to make many small fine tubes.  Fibermesh can be realistic, sure, but it is outdated technology. Generally it does not look more realistic than the best strand based hair or hair cards, because fibermesh would often be made with older tech. 

  Another type of polygonal hair could be hair cards. As described by other poster above.  Hair cards are usually the lowest poly, and often seen in games too because they are lighter. They can look very realistic despite being low poly.

  Strand based hair is the best option we have in my opinion because it is just single lines of vertices, not thick polygonal tubes.  Nowadays strand-based hair can emulate a perfectly smooth tube of infinite polygons in iray because we now have the iray curves implemented a few years ago.

  In my opinion the hair typography is like so (only two types)

  1. Polygonal/mesh hair: fibermesh, hair cards
  2. Strand-based hair: SBH, polyline, curves, splines etc

  Both types can be dforced and morphed.

  You can color any of them in Surfaces tab...

  You cannot de facto change length easily for any of them, but you would need to review the product description of each product because maybe the creator will have allowed you to change length by the way they set up morphs or they way they set up opacity maps/shaders.  Export them out of Daz to another software if you insist on changing some aspect that you cant change in Daz.

  Post edited by lilweep on September 20
• lina.catfish Posts: 22

  September 22

  Thank you for these classifications. Everything already appears clearer! :)

  A quick question about the length: couldn't this be addressed via the Opacity Maps (for meshes)? I haven't tested it myself; I was just considering how I might go about testing it.
• crosswind Posts: 9,537

  September 22 edited September 22

  lina.catfish said:

  Thank you for these classifications. Everything already appears clearer! :)

  A quick question about the length: couldn't this be addressed via the Opacity Maps (for meshes)? I haven't tested it myself; I was just considering how I might go about testing it.

  With this way, you can just make the hair shorter rather than longer because it'll be limited to the exsiting hair geometry ~~  You can make the polygonal hair longer with external modeling / sculpting software, or with Mesh Grabber / Geometry Sculptor in DS.

  Post edited by crosswind on September 22
• Padone Posts: 3,995

  September 23 edited September 24

  Also SBH was introduced after G8, so you can assume everything before is not. As well hair curves and the omnihair shader were introduced after G9. For example Victoria 8 is code 43673, so a hair product before that code can't be SBH, that of course doesn't mean everything after is SBH as PAs are not forced to adopt the new hairs.

  p.s. In general you can always look at codes to evaluate how old a product is, or go to the documentation center.

  http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/start

  p.p.s. Also be aware that hair curves don't support the omnihair shader as you get a different result.

  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/572941/

  Post edited by Padone on September 24
• lina.catfish Posts: 22

  September 25

  Padone said:

  Also SBH was introduced after G8, so you can assume everything before is not. As well hair curves and the omnihair shader were introduced after G9. For example Victoria 8 is code 43673, so a hair product before that code can't be SBH, that of course doesn't mean everything after is SBH as PAs are not forced to adopt the new hairs.

  Now that I'm reading this, I realize that none of these digital products have a release date. This is surprising and somewhat confusing, especially since many (most) were created before the official DAZ version. They are only labeled as "Compatible Software: Daz Studio 4.24" (Victoria 4.2), while I would expect compatibility with more DAZ versions. - So: Thanks for the tip with the product code.
• lilweep Posts: 2,740

  September 25 edited September 25

  Padone said:

   

  p.p.s. Also be aware that hair curves don't support the omnihair shader as you get a different result.

  https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/572941/#

  That thread isnt saying that... That thread was before omnihair even came outT

  They seem to render prefectly fine withn omnihair shader in my experience.  Also to your other point about SBH not existing until xyz date, which is true, but didnt we have hair curves before "SBH" in various forms, which are principally the same thing when it comes to render time?  Pretty sure curves/spline hair was in use before "SBH" became an official term used by Daz to refer to a specific generation method for curves.

  What were LAMH and Garibaldi Express? This is well before I started using daz, but i thought those were using curves? I could be wrong.  But besides those things, were there not other spline/curve based hairs.

  Post edited by lilweep on September 25
• a_gus Posts: 10

  September 25 edited September 25

  I have a simple question.
  I run Daz 3D on an old iMac (2019) with Core i9 3,6 Ghz.
  I would like to know if 10 minutes is an acceptable time to do a simulation (just gravity with default set up) on hair like dforce Primavera Hair (https://www.daz3d.com/primavera-hair-with-dforce-for-genesis-8-females).
  OK, I agree, there are a lot of hair here ...
  It is just for comparison.

  Post edited by a_gus on September 25
• Padone Posts: 3,995

  September 25

  @lilweep Ok then it's the dual lobe hair shader which is not supprted by hair curves, my bad. Though personally I get different results with the omnishader presets depending if they are applied to hair curves or sbh, for example the "black hair" preset works fine with sbh while it doesn't work with hair curves, so I suppose there's something odd. LAMH and Garibaldi are proprietary addons, not a daz studio feature, that means for example LAMH only works with the products from the same PA. While hair curves are a iray feature which is supported in daz studio.