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Except most hairs are truly unuseable, as this discussion is about. I don't know probably PAs use some server farm to develope hairs and they pretend all users can have the same, probably they forget DAZ Studio IS NOT a professional application as Max and Maya so probably most users don't get a super powerful hardware, they would like figures to work in their ordinary home or gaming computer. At least it would be nice, as also suggested here, to better describe the hair in the product page so one will know if a hair is unuseable for common hardware before purchase.
However, for interested PAs, it may not be difficult to provide two versions of the same hair, one regular and one with reduced guides, the difference would be limited to filling in with PR, whatever this "downgrade" means at least it would be useable for common users.
p.s. Or as also suggested here, DAZ could unlock the dForce tools to all users, so we could finally fix the hairs without having to rely on willing PAs.
Binding dForce tools, Multi-Resolution Morph Support plugin... etc. into Premier tier would be an attractive offer if Daz doens't want to release them for free ~~
I was saying this from the time they introduced Premier
would be the only thing that would entice me to join
Ah, thank you very much !
Indeed ~ Why not let Daz users directly benefit from using these tools in a healthy way rather than letting some guys sort of 'reverse-engineered' the plugins and sell them on other sites......
Except most hairs are truly unuseable, as this discussion is about. I don't know probably PAs use some server farm to develope hairs and they pretend all users can have the same, probably they forget DAZ Studio IS NOT a professional application as Max and Maya so probably most users don't get a super powerful hardware, they would like figures to work in their ordinary home or gaming computer
However, for interested PAs, it may not be difficult to provide two versions of the same hair, one regular and one with reduced guides, the difference would be limited to filling in with PR, whatever this "downgrade" means at least it would be useable for common users.
I can completely sympathize with your issue at hand, but there is nothing easy about supplying a second hair complete with morphs,textures,surface set up etc.. Yes the main hair is done, but vertex count would require everything to be done a second time, including additional promos. With the current prices in the marketplace, it's hard to justify that kind of work for the return we get. I was mulling over the idea of a basic for export only hair object, but that also comes with its pros and cons as well.
Ok, thank you for letting us know how's going on the PA side. I'd add that this is not an issue affecting me personally, as I work in blender where we can sparse daz hairs or use blender native hairs. Just trying to help here.
I just view it as one of the biggest disappointments DAZ could have ever come up with for users
for literal decades Poser had dynamic hair and Carrara almost as long
the dynamic cloth in D|S was locked to Optitex but at least thanks to the dyn2morph python script I could use Poser cloth dynamic sims in both DAZ and Carrara
then Virtual World Dynamics and Dforce came along
everything could be dynamic
all they needed was the hair
then they decided in their wisdom the same restrictions Optitex cloth had was a good model to use for the hair
only worse
one could spend about 10grand and get an Optitex license if so inclined
Dforce Strand hair has no price, just exclusively PAs only, a club one cannot simply just join at any price
and the rest of us have to take or leave whatever they create
increasingly the latter for me
I simply don't have the hardware for animation using it and static I could actually use the strandbased editor or better yet AI
it just makes AI very attractive
I still buy a lot of other DAZ content but mostly export it to other apps now
not Blender so far but that day will come
or more likely I will go to the dark side and use cloudbased AI
Perhaps published artists that use the DForce system to help create movement or morphs for the hair but NOT intending for it to be simulated SHOULD include a notation about that on their sales page. I don't think it would hinder buyers but better inform the masses of what's intended and what's not intended with their product.
I'm still waiting for a hair asset that don't require voodoo to turn upside down. Hasn't a PA ever put a figure on a playground jungle gym hanging upside down from their knees? Anyone?
I'm joking. Sort of.
This is the best I can find (I think),
It is a Linday polygon hair.
There is an old mermaid hair (SBH) I never have tried upside down.
It's pretty standard for hairs to be like 1mil+ poly. In attached, Left is a Metahuman hair i converted (and simplified), middle is a hair from Artstation i converted (and simplfiied), right is one of my hairs made for Daz. They are all in same vert count ball park. The critique that most daz hairs are unusually "unuseable" because they are too high poly to render doesnt really make sense.
Or are you saying they are unuseable because they cannot be simulated? There is a place for static hairs in my opinion that can be animated with rigging or morphs rather than simulation.
Anyways, one of the things that is great about hair in Unreal is the hair grooms can be simulated as strands and also auto-converted to hair cards for better performance and LODs. Perhaps a solution like that in Daz to complement the Daz SBH system would be very useful. Basically every hair would then be "useable" in some capacity as either a groom or as lower poly hair cards and vendors would not need to compromise on their vision for the hair looking a certain way. Of course, vendors can still convert grooms to cards anyway, but that is asking a lot of them to remake their product.
If PAs wanted to avoid doing the dforce hair generation in Daz, then they could still provide a "light" and a "heavy" version as options yes. But it depends on the hair as to how much effort would be involved, as some hairs also have rigging like rigged ponytails and other props added like hair ties etc, and all of that would need to be done twice.
And even in more simple cases, it does mean factoring that into their pipelines/workflow. Some PAs probably do not see that as necessary if they consider the hairs to already be optimised and fit for purpose.
For the record, I would see the steps of the workflow to involve creating two copies - a sparse and a dense version - for each morph, either directly in the software used to author the hairs or by resampling/processing with geometry nodes or equivalent. One complication comes with material presets though, because two versions of material presets may be required because heirarchical mat presets have many limitations. Communicaing that to end user and ensuring end user understands there are two versions of the product and two material presets, in my opinion, overcomplicates the situation.
Fixing such hairs would mean exporting and resampling in Blender etc and then bringing back into Daz to regenerate with Dforce and it would never look the same and it would involve going through the content creation pipeline from scratch, losing all morphs and anything PA added. So it's not like having access to Daz tools would enable end user to edit or fix easily.
Any particular Linday hair?
This was https://www.daz3d.com/soft-classic-hair-with-dforce-for-genesis-8-and-81-females
But I think all (at least newer) hair follow the same methodology and can be very nicely simulated
If all you want to do is make some unstyled troll hair for a single static render, you can use the SBH Editor and throw something together pretty quickly. I am not saying this is good, just for demo purposes only.
You can art-direct it a bit more than you can with simulation.
There is no dforce option to the SBH editor, as long as you are not a DAZ store vendor.
It's not the number of strands that matters, it's how they are generated and computed. If you convert every single strand to a dforce guide then they will all be computed for simulation, as well if we use tessellation instead of curves then the rendering will be much slower and require much more vram. An optimized hair gets the same number of strands, but they are PR and PS following the guides, plus using curves to simplify rendering and vram usage. The problem with most dForce hairs is they use too many guides rather than PR PS, and/or they are tessellated instead of using curves.
However, @chevybabe25 did explain this is a design choice, this way it is easier for the PAs to get the exact style they want.
I will also say.. to my knowledge PR Hairs add up on weight. They dont utilize curves? or is actual geometry? I cant recall.. but they are less accurate because they are generated after a simulation but before a render. They can look really nice, adding some extra variation/fill, particularly in static hairs where simming doesnt matter.
Of course they add on weight, but the point is they should be used instead of too many guides, if used this way they simplify. Of course if you use a gazillion guides then also add PR they add weight.
While true, what I was saying is that for something like the example, you don't need simulation, you can manually create a hair very quickly in SBH Editor instead of simulating. It is just a mess of hair hanging down so does not require much effort to style in SBH Editor. I would not suggest this as an option or solution for all scenarios, only the scenario given.
Yes, as chevybabe and others point out, it is a design choice. It's not like PAs purposely use too many guide curves just to be annoying - they choose not to have a simulatable hairstyle because regenerating it in daz would degrade/change the look of the groom they created. Of course, these still get marketed as dforce and naturally everyone assumes dforce means they are intended for simulation when in fact they are intended to be static hairs that use - if available - morphs or rigging for controls.
To put it into context you may relate to: just like a sparse sampling of PR/guide strands is not going to get you an exact replica of the hair in Blender when you regenerate daz hairs there, a sparse sampling and regeneration in Daz SBH system does not generate an exact replica when vendors bring their hair into Daz, which is why not everyone wants to do that. Some of the best hairs on Daz are static. A hair is still useable if it doesnt simulate. It's only unuseable if it doesnt render.
If a hair is dforce strand based hair, i believe it must have the tessellation option under properties, which you can turn off.
Of course they add on weight, but the point is they should be used instead of too many guides, if used this way they simplify. Of course if you use a gazillion guides then also add PR they add weight.
No. I think you misunderstood what I was saying or maybe I didnt state it correctly. PR Hairs I believe are actual geometry. The weight they add is much much more than the same amount of PS Hairs.
and/or they are tessellated instead of using curves.
I cant imagine who is doing this anymore but if you are referring to the older hairs, tlike those for g8 and g3 those were put in place way before curves were introduced.
If you mean PR can't use curves, then how do they render with tessellation zero ?
p.s. To my knowledge, it's SBH that can't use curves, as we can't set tessellation zero for SBH.
Curves were introduced way back when.. I released my shaders for the curves back in June of 2023. Prior to this we had to have tesselation 3 set on the lines. To my knowledge PR Hairs are thier own thing and are like some kind of generated geometry Daz magic, hence why they are so much heavier than PS hairs.
from what I can infir from the outside
curves act like Carrara guide hairs
I always run my Carrara hair sims with less hair then up the count afterwards but do use at least 100 guide hairs segmented about 40 often far more
of course since Dforce SBH is a closed box, these sort of parameters are not really available and changing them after simulation often destroys the simulation in DAZ Studio unlike Carrara
Any spline/polyline will automatically render as an Iray Curve in Iray. E.g., import one from Blender, it will render as Iray Curve.
To make SBH objects into curves/splines/polyline, set render tesselation to 1. They will render as Iray Curve.
For dforce SBH, set to either 1 or 0 for Iray Curves. Typically setting it to 0 fixes glossiness issues that are present if set to 1, for some reason.
Zoom in on any hair to observe this. For observing it, it's easier if you set the Start Width of the curve to very large number.
Curve and polyline are two very different things, though they look similar. To my knowledge tessellation 1 does polylines, not curves.
edit. The following states that tessellation 1 does curves only in the viewport, not in rendering. Where is reference for tessellation 1 rendering curves ?
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7487046/#Comment_7487046
Sure but in Daz Studio we only see the Iray Curve aka Iray Fiber generated at render time as a smooth geometric path bevelled with circle profile of infinite smoothness. At any other time the strands of hair are just represented as verts connected by straight edges (polylines) rather than as control points and a continuous geometric path, which I guess is what we would call a curve/spline.
I see what you are saying, and sorry yes you are right, tesselation of 1 works only in Iray render preview in viewport for any type of strand hair (whether the strand hair is polyline or SBH or dforce SBH)
But for dforce SBH, only the value of 0 will work for both viewport AND full render.
I like the strand-based hair, but I have a RTX4090 card. Reading the description is important. Outoftouch (I think) for example, is clear that his/her hair doesn't simulate much. But it has bones (sometimes), which is better. Also, Meshgrabber might help.
Annoyingly, SBH iray curves (tessellation 1) doesn't properly manage the uv of textures.
mutter