Why is hair such a struggle?
glennblackphotos
Posts: 160
After all these years of keeping an eye on Poser and Daz it seems that hair still has a long way to go before it looks realistic while skin is jaw droppingly realistic.
why is this?
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Do you know, how many single hairs an average human has?
If you want to have hair being the same realistic as skin, you have to implement these billion of single hair meshes. --> useless!
But you try to reproduce it by small areas which you give a hair like structure using bump/displacement. That's what they did for most of the hair props.
And the iRay shaders offer reflection, refraction, transmission, scattering, ... parameters to simulate the optical physics of hair.
If you try long enough you may succeed to create a near to realistic look. Good luck.
I for myself found a solution for the existing hair products, which is suitable if you don't look too close.
https://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/G2M-Basic-Hair-Variations-605986728
https://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/BrittHair-iRay-Variations-605768467
https://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/Koz-Messy-Hair-605597768
https://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/Surfer-Hair-iRay-605438487
https://andysanderson.deviantart.com/art/Duarte-Hair-643976476
I actually think we are getting some pretty great hair at the moment, the closer we move towards fibermesh and ptex the better. With that said, the male hair is really out-shining the female hair at the moment, just look at this. The issue is volume and texture limitations. Long/high volume female hair would be incredibly resource intensive and due to texture limitations, it would all be one flat colour, unless it was built in a modular fashion.
We are progressing though! I don't think trans-mapping will be around forever.
OutOfTouch has some really good hair products that look good when rendered.
http://www.daz3d.com/outoftouch
I agree for sure; love her hair.
What she manages to do with what is a pretty poor system is amazing. But it doesn't look believable for everyday use outside of a few poses; out of the salon look is easier than general use. The work getting it to look good in a lot of poses takes a lot of time.
Thanks for the help guys, I guess I will have to have a good search.
A bit OT, but i'm pretty sure OOT is a young german guy.
I am getting very satisfactory hair results using iRay. I set the cutout opacity to 60% or less (usually) and often use 2 or 3 different kinds of hair on the same figure (blanking out the parts of each that are irrelevant).
Unless you're rendering closeup shots, I really don't see any need to render every strand of hair. From a distance, you can't distinguish a single strand of hair anyway. Polymesh transmapped hair is just as convincing, imho. It's fast to load and render too.
Some of the transmapped hair released lately are indeed extremely impressive in non directional HDR environments.
The remaining challenge is that you can still see the lack of sub surface scattering, transmission or backlight effects even from a distance.
Enter in the google image search the keywords
hair backlit sun
https://www.google.ch/search?q=hair+backlight+sun&rls=com.microsoft:en-GB:IE-Address&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi1pcma35bQAhWHDBoKHQ2DA9AQ_AUICCgB&biw=907&bih=413#tbm=isch&q=hair+backlit+sun
If you are looking to create such an effect you will need fiber mesh hair.
100'000 to 140'000 fiber strands similar as real hair.
Hopefully now that more people have access to 8GB VRAM it will soon become worth the time for artists to spend some energy creating fiber hair products.
If in 2017 12 GB VRAM cards may become more wide spread this should then certainly be enough room for at least one or two characters with fully detailed hair.
Hi,
looking for alternate design ever is useful.
You have to keep in mind, that there're not only one or two characters, you may want to have a photorealistic (detailed) environment, too. This would drive the memory need into astronomical spheres.
Related to the "hair backlight":
Do you know, that there are further parameters, not only transmission, scattering or translucency?
I remembered playing around with refraction, which somehow is similar. Even with very small values your effect becomes visible.
Here I positioned a spotlight right behind her head. You see some shine on top and on the right, which is not caused by glossy reflections.
Of cause, some more detailed mesh structures would be helpful, but also increasing GPU memory need. This is quite old G1.
And it's only a first test.
It's my pet dream. I tried a lot to recreate that effect with iray. For now, it's not possible to easily do it and be convincing.
My apologies if that is the case. I hope he (?) will forgive me. :)