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Reminder To Myself: Never again SBH Hair

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  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,118

    For FilaToon you want to use tesselation of 3 or 4, and make the hairs thicker and less numerous... ideally. Many approaches to hair design don't allow for easily tweaked hair counts.

    The same thing was broadly true with 3DL.

    While tessellation 2 CAN work... I don't recommend it. You get 2 dimensional hairs and the orientation of them can be quirky.

     

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 41,567

    Torquinox said:

    WendyLuvsCatz said:

    Filament is actually the main render engine I do use it tessalated in as cutout opacity hair doesn't work well there, but I don't use Filatoon 

    that doesn't work well thanks to its geometry shell based shading, so double the mesh and too fine

    There must be a trick to it, then because when I've loaded strand hairs, they've been invisible in filament. Don't know what to say. It would be great if I could get it to work!


    Card hair, I've figured out that I can selectively shut off cut out opacity on parts of the hair and as long as transparencies aren't layered, results can look pretty good. The cards on the tips of a hair tend to be rectangular and look bad without cutout opacity. That's true in filatoon as well as normal filament.
     

    The best choice there may be the solid-modeled anime hairs, though they always look cartoonish and stylized.

    generate PBR hairs must be checked and line tesselation of 3 

  • MasterstrokeMasterstroke Posts: 2,502

    3DSaga said:

    I asked DAZ AI (Victoria) a similar question a few days ago; "Why do some of my dForce hair products not simulate?" I don't remember the answer verbatim so I just asked again, and this is how it was explained:

    "Some hair products are built using the dForce hair system, but the creator never intended the final product to actually run a simulation. They use the dForce tools mainly to help design or generate the hair strands, then leave the hair as a static asset in the final product.

    So even though the name includes “dForce,” the hair may:

    • Have no simulation setup
    • Not respond to dForce simulation at all
    • Be meant to stay fixed in the scene

    This naming can definitely be confusing, because “dForce hair” doesn’t always mean it will simulate."

    Granted, DAZ AI isn't always completely accurate so I'm reluctant to say this is "official" DAZ documentation. 

    The dforce hairs I'm talking about are obviously simulating, but very, very slow. Some hair strains are actually moving. 
    If there is no simulation available, then it musn't be called dforce, because that would be misleading.

  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,873

    WendyLuvsCatz said:

    Torquinox said:

    WendyLuvsCatz said:

    Filament is actually the main render engine I do use it tessalated in as cutout opacity hair doesn't work well there, but I don't use Filatoon 

    that doesn't work well thanks to its geometry shell based shading, so double the mesh and too fine

    There must be a trick to it, then because when I've loaded strand hairs, they've been invisible in filament. Don't know what to say. It would be great if I could get it to work!


    Card hair, I've figured out that I can selectively shut off cut out opacity on parts of the hair and as long as transparencies aren't layered, results can look pretty good. The cards on the tips of a hair tend to be rectangular and look bad without cutout opacity. That's true in filatoon as well as normal filament.
     

    The best choice there may be the solid-modeled anime hairs, though they always look cartoonish and stylized.

    generate PBR hairs must be checked and line tesselation of 3 

    PR hairs. 

  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,873

    Masterstroke said:

    3DSaga said:

    I asked DAZ AI (Victoria) a similar question a few days ago; "Why do some of my dForce hair products not simulate?" I don't remember the answer verbatim so I just asked again, and this is how it was explained:

    "Some hair products are built using the dForce hair system, but the creator never intended the final product to actually run a simulation. They use the dForce tools mainly to help design or generate the hair strands, then leave the hair as a static asset in the final product.

    So even though the name includes “dForce,” the hair may:

    • Have no simulation setup
    • Not respond to dForce simulation at all
    • Be meant to stay fixed in the scene

    This naming can definitely be confusing, because “dForce hair” doesn’t always mean it will simulate."

    Granted, DAZ AI isn't always completely accurate so I'm reluctant to say this is "official" DAZ documentation. 

    The dforce hairs I'm talking about are obviously simulating, but very, very slow. Some hair strains are actually moving. 

    Just because it can doesnt mean it should. It doesnt mean the PA set it up with the intent for you to simulate.

    As i said, it is computationally expensive to simulate very single strand so not surprising it is slow.

    You can check if that is what you are doing by looking at just the style curves.  Turn off generate PR hairs. If that leaves you with still a ton of hairs, then those style guides are what you are trying to simulate and it will take a long time.


    If there is no simulation available, then it musn't be called dforce, because that would be misleading.

    I agree, but that is what Daz are doing, by convention.

  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,873

    mattlight07 said:

    lilweep said:

    3DSaga said:

    I asked DAZ AI (Victoria) a similar question a few days ago; "Why do some of my dForce hair products not simulate?" I don't remember the answer verbatim so I just asked again, and this is how it was explained:

    "Some hair products are built using the dForce hair system, but the creator never intended the final product to actually run a simulation. They use the dForce tools mainly to help design or generate the hair strands, then leave the hair as a static asset in the final product.

    So even though the name includes “dForce,” the hair may:

    • Have no simulation setup
    • Not respond to dForce simulation at all
    • Be meant to stay fixed in the scene

    This naming can definitely be confusing, because “dForce hair” doesn’t always mean it will simulate."

    Granted, DAZ AI isn't always completely accurate so I'm reluctant to say this is "official" DAZ documentation. 

    I dont think there is any documentation, but that agrees with what has been said in threads on this forum over the years.

    Hair physics systems in most software are not actually simulating every single strand of hair, that would be a pretty computationally expensive/stupid way to do it. Obviously aglorithms have come a long way, and it's no longer fantasy to have a sim do such things. But certainly in blender today and daz today, simulation is done on proxy strands, not every single strand. 

    In Daz dforce hair, my understanding is that the guide strands (and the PS strands) are the proxies that get simulated and then the children hairs just follow.  Not every hair strand simulates.

    So that means for a dforce hair to actually be simulatable, the PA/Vendor should set the hair up with guide strands/ps strands and then children hairs get generated inside daz.  But some Daz PAs clearly do not want to generate the children hairs within Daz studio because the hairs look better in the the software where they author them.  Those PAs bring in every single strand of hair instead of just a minimal number of guide strands. They still convert the hair to dforce hair to get access to other properties, but the hair is not going to be simulatable with so many guide strands.  They will probably have changed the dforce sim settings to stop it from simulating.

    Anyways, the confusing nomenclature probably leads to many returns and sales queries, so it's strange that Daz has not changed the naming conventions yet.  

    Can I get a source about the blender part? Is it enforced that it could only simulate guides and not individual hairs? What if you place the modifier after the hair hair duplication? I seem to recall videos of it producing different movements per strand on a single guide curve.

    It's not enforced in Blender, and it isnt enforced in Daz either.

    But it is what people do because doing otherwise makes simulation takes too long.

  • TorquinoxTorquinox Posts: 4,882

    Thanks @WendyLuvsCatz , @Oso3D & @lilweep . I'll give strand hair another try! It would be nice to use it. 

  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 8,068
    I tried the Omni shader in 4.24 after updating my default resources, and, well, it's slow to render on my machine in comparison to dForce cloth based hair (13 minutes with it, 4.5 minutes without). It looks fairly good, but I can see it's best for the type of portrait I don't do. Ahh well. Regards, Richard.
  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,873
    edited September 6

    richardandtracy said:

    I tried the Omni shader in 4.24 after updating my default resources, and, well, it's slow to render on my machine in comparison to dForce cloth based hair (13 minutes with it, 4.5 minutes without). It looks fairly good, but I can see it's best for the type of portrait I don't do. Ahh well. Regards, Richard.

    that doesnt sound slow to me... 13 minutes for a render seems quite good.  But it's unclear what your 13 minute milestone is - maybe that's only for 1 iteration, who knows - as you didnt specify.

    I dont know what your process is, but you can do your renders without hair, and then do a second pass just spot-rendering the head + hear + immediate surroundings. Doing these two render passes separately should converge faster.  

     

    Post edited by lilweep on
  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 8,068
    It was a simple 2 character scene to 95% convergence simply testing the effect of the one hair substitution at a resolution of 800w*1200h. The fact that one hair tripled the render time told me a lot. Regards, Richard.
  • PadonePadone Posts: 4,328

    It's not the technology as dForce can do its work if the setup is well done, it's rather the PAs who should be more descriptive of their hair features in the product page. Of course another disadvantage is we don't have control on dforce hair because DAZ decided so. Thus we can't even try to fix them and the only option is to ask for refund, if the PA description is not clear or deceiving. However exporting to blender is always possible, as Diffeomorphic provides tools to edit dforce hair, but this of course requires a fair amount of work if the hair is not "ready to use". That's why it is often preferable to use blender native hairs instead.

    https://github.com/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Hair_Tools

  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,873

    richardandtracy said:

    It was a simple 2 character scene to 95% convergence simply testing the effect of the one hair substitution at a resolution of 800w*1200h. The fact that one hair tripled the render time told me a lot. Regards, Richard.

    If it looked 10 times as good and only cost you 8 minutes more for something that will be inflicted upon the world forever, it could be worth it. The cost benefit analysis is up to you.

  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 8,068
    Yup, and for my needs, I don't think it's necessary. I don't do close portraits where I can see it excels. Regards, Richard.
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 42,416

    ...picked up a G9 strand based hiar that was stylistically ideal for one of my characters (Curly Low Bun for Genesis 9).  Manual fitting seemed much trickier even though it included a cap, particularly as there were no default character head fits (which actually helps in the process to a degree). It also uses dual lobe shaders so some of Slush's hair tools supposedly wont work on it.  After I did swapped into Iray view mode it looked a bir strange particularly around the ears and neck I increased the collision setting a couple notches but started noticing the cap itself "bleeding" into the ears in openGL view.. 

    When I tried to make a very minor adjustment to the tessellation suddenly that's when everything went haywire.  Not only did the Daz programme become unresponsive. (the dreaded "not responding" error), but it locked my entire system up to where I couldn't even open Task Manager to see memory/CPU usage and cancel the process  This lasted for about 20 minutes (at one point I even considered doing a hard shutdown to get out of it)  Slowly I was able to finally regain some bit of control and was finally able to close the programme via Windows Task Manager.

    The silly part is with all the discounts I only paid a little over 2 USD for it and feel silly writing a support ticket  So i just uninstalled it until I am finally able ro afford upgrading my ancient hardware. 

    Yeah, definitely staying l;ear of dForce SB hairs for now, particularly those that use Omni shaders as I am still on 4.21. (which has the last Nvidia driver that supports my OS).

  • 3DSaga3DSaga Posts: 914

    Does the Omni Shader add to the difficulty of using that hair? I don't think I have any hair with Omni Shaders. There's a nice looking hair for Cheyenne G9 in QG that is tempting, but after this discussion of dForce SBH and now Omni Shaders, maybe I should stay away from it. 

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 42,416

    ...that particular hair I mentioned does not use the Omni shader system.

    A few months ago I purchased Untamed Long Hair for Genesis 9, 8.1 and 8  which is strand based and uses Omni shaders but didn't state so clearly in the product description,  I fortunately was able to return it for a refund as it was useless since, as I mentioned above, I am still on Daz 4.21.

     

     

  • backgroundbackground Posts: 935

    lilweep said:

     

    If it looked 10 times as good and only cost you 8 minutes more for something that will be inflicted upon the world forever, it could be worth it. The cost benefit analysis is up to you.

     If strand hair looked 10 times as good I would reconsider, but it often looks like a wig made out of straw.

  • nemesis10nemesis10 Posts: 4,020

    background said:

    lilweep said:

     

    If it looked 10 times as good and only cost you 8 minutes more for something that will be inflicted upon the world forever, it could be worth it. The cost benefit analysis is up to you.

     If strand hair looked 10 times as good I would reconsider, but it often looks like a wig made out of straw.

    That is often due to the settings for the shader on the hair. You can adjust the shine, thickness of the strands, secondary reflections, loads and loads of attributes. I am now 100% fan of the omnishader.

  • GordigGordig Posts: 10,805

    kyoto kid said:

    A few months ago I purchased Untamed Long Hair for Genesis 9, 8.1 and 8  which is strand based and uses Omni shaders but didn't state so clearly in the product description,  I fortunately was able to return it for a refund as it was useless since, as I mentioned above, I am still on Daz 4.21.

    Omni Shader is just a shader; you could swap it out for any other hair shader and it would work just as well.

  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 8,068

    I think what's needed is for the hair to explicitly state whether it's

    1. Conventional card hair (eg most of Akhelloos's hair)
    2. dForce Cloth hair that can be simulated (I think most of Linday's best hairs are this type)
    3. dForce Strand hair that can be simulated
    4. dForce Strand hair that doesn't simulate

    And one other thing that is imperative to prevent accidental purchase for an inappropriate version is the minimum version of DS required to do what needs doing to render it to be displayed on the sale page. Having a no-questions-asked returns policy is not an acceptable substitute for publishing this information.

    Regards,

    Richard

  • MasterstrokeMasterstroke Posts: 2,502
    edited September 7

    richardandtracy said:

    I think what's needed is for the hair to explicitly state whether it's

    [...]

    4. dForce Strand hair that doesn't simulate

    [...]

    Regards,

    Richard

     I agree, though it should be: 4. Strand based hair that doesn't simulate

    Post edited by Masterstroke on
  • jmucchiellojmucchiello Posts: 2,140

    richardandtracy said:

    I think what's needed is for the hair to explicitly state whether it's

    1. Conventional card hair (eg most of Akhelloos's hair)
    2. dForce Cloth hair that can be simulated (I think most of Linday's best hairs are this type)
    3. dForce Strand hair that can be simulated
    4. dForce Strand hair that doesn't simulate

    And one other thing that is imperative to prevent accidental purchase for an inappropriate version is the minimum version of DS required to do what needs doing to render it to be displayed on the sale page. Having a no-questions-asked returns policy is not an acceptable substitute for publishing this information.

    Imperative? While I agree the store should have this data, this isn't a hill I'd die on. There are hundreds of improvements needed in the store. I don't think strand vs mesh hair is in the top 10.

    And your last sentence is why it would make business sense for Daz to improve the details of their store items: it would allow their customer support department focus on real support issues and not on refunds for purchases that only frustrate customers.

  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,873

    background said:

    lilweep said:

     

    If it looked 10 times as good and only cost you 8 minutes more for something that will be inflicted upon the world forever, it could be worth it. The cost benefit analysis is up to you.

     If strand hair looked 10 times as good I would reconsider, but it often looks like a wig made out of straw.

    the "if" condition and "often" qualifier are doing a lot of heavy lifting in your assessment.

    The best SBH are an entire order of magnitude better than the best cloth hair. Obviously if you for whatever reason decide to buy and use the worst ones, then that is not strand-based hair's fault.

  • richardandtracyrichardandtracy Posts: 8,068

    jmucchiello said:

    richardandtracy said:

    I think what's needed is for the hair to explicitly state whether it's

    1. Conventional card hair (eg most of Akhelloos's hair)
    2. dForce Cloth hair that can be simulated (I think most of Linday's best hairs are this type)
    3. dForce Strand hair that can be simulated
    4. dForce Strand hair that doesn't simulate

    And one other thing that is imperative to prevent accidental purchase for an inappropriate version is the minimum version of DS required to do what needs doing to render it to be displayed on the sale page. Having a no-questions-asked returns policy is not an acceptable substitute for publishing this information.

    Imperative? While I agree the store should have this data, this isn't a hill I'd die on. There are hundreds of improvements needed in the store. I don't think strand vs mesh hair is in the top 10.

    And your last sentence is why it would make business sense for Daz to improve the details of their store items: it would allow their customer support department focus on real support issues and not on refunds for purchases that only frustrate customers.

    I agree. No business case for DAZ. But for an organisation that wished to be seen as customer centric, efficient & responsive, I believe there is one.

    Regards,

    Richard

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 42,416

    Gordig said:

    kyoto kid said:

    A few months ago I purchased Untamed Long Hair for Genesis 9, 8.1 and 8  which is strand based and uses Omni shaders but didn't state so clearly in the product description,  I fortunately was able to return it for a refund as it was useless since, as I mentioned above, I am still on Daz 4.21.

    Omni Shader is just a shader; you could swap it out for any other hair shader and it would work just as well.

    ....I tried that.  I have all of Sloshwerks hair shading tools and none worked  .

  • ElorElor Posts: 4,121

    I could be mistaken, but I don't think Sloshwerks released hair tools for SBH.

    I don't have it and can't check, but there is this older product by @Totte and @Chevybabe25, which should work with SBH (best to check in the commercial thread before though):

    https://www.daz3d.com/line-zero-dforce-strand-hair-shaders

    Commercial thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/636316/released-line-zero-dforce-strand-hair-shaders/

  • TotteTotte Posts: 15,130

    Elor said:

    I could be mistaken, but I don't think Sloshwerks released hair tools for SBH.

    I don't have it and can't check, but there is this older product by @Totte and @Chevybabe25, which should work with SBH (best to check in the commercial thread before though):

    https://www.daz3d.com/line-zero-dforce-strand-hair-shaders

    Commercial thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/636316/released-line-zero-dforce-strand-hair-shaders/

    There is a major difference between SloshWerks superb shaders for Mesh Based Hair and Omn shaders for Stand Based Hair, as they are great for what they are designed for.
    Chevybabe25 do have some more SBH shaders, like Revolution, which is great SBH shader system too. I did the scripts for line zero and Chevy did the shade system for it.

     


     

  • nemesis10nemesis10 Posts: 4,020

    kyoto kid said:

    Gordig said:

    kyoto kid said:

    A few months ago I purchased Untamed Long Hair for Genesis 9, 8.1 and 8  which is strand based and uses Omni shaders but didn't state so clearly in the product description,  I fortunately was able to return it for a refund as it was useless since, as I mentioned above, I am still on Daz 4.21.

    Omni Shader is just a shader; you could swap it out for any other hair shader and it would work just as well.

    ....I tried that.  I have all of Sloshwerks hair shading tools and none worked  .

    Just in case, you did it in two steps: you convert the hair to something else than the omnishader by using the hair shader in the Default Resources, and then you applied the Sloshwerks shader?  

  • chevybabe25chevybabe25 Posts: 1,357

    Yes the Line zero shaders will work just fine with the one click.  Some people even prefer them :) 

  • LauritaLaurita Posts: 289

    Is there any way to recognize if dForce hair can be simulated or not? For example FeSoul's hair assets are called dForce hair but don't simulate very well or sometimes at all. I am very curious to know.

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