How to use Blender's hair particle system without greatly reducing performance in Daz studio?
no nose
Posts: 310
I think this might be the best place to post this question, though it might be more fitting for the new users category.
One of the things i've been trying to experimient with lately is making hair, the hair particle system has been pretty good at making that. Though when I import it into daz, I notice that overall performance greatly reduces. Currently what I do after setting up the hair is making it into a new mesh and using the screw modifier (since otherwise it's invisible in daz)
Anything that could be done to deal with this?
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For invisible props on import, check the Opacity setting in the Surfaces tab.
DS performance may take a severe hit if a mesh has "too many" polygons, or if the mesh has extra embedded data in the format used aside from face and texture data.
I checked, if I just export the hair without the screw modifier, there is no opacity options.
There will be opacity settings in the Editor tab of the Surfaces pane in DS, with the model seelcted in the list on the left of the pane.
I checked, if I just export the hair without the screw modifier, there is no opacity options.
That's what I did, there's nothing in the surfaces tab though.
Well, here's what I know, which you may already. Blender particle-based hair can't be rendered by DS: it's only edges, and DS needs faces - doesn't 'understand' edges on their own. So of course you can convert to a mesh in Blender, making each edge into a face, each 'hair' into a strip of faces. The screw modifier will make the hair strip less flat, hence more easily seen. Say you have 1,000 hairs, with 5 edges in each, that would give you a 5,000 face mesh. But 1,000 hairs is nothing at all for anything above a small area (eyebrow?). A really good thick head could be 100,000 - so 500,000 faces. Then add SubD to smooth them out - 2-3 million faces, maybe more. That's a lot for a domestic computer to handle smoothly, especially if you have a Daz figure with HD details and subd turned on as well.
This is why polygon based hair still rules the roost for all but eyebrows and other small areas. Though having said that, I noticed a new hair product I bought from the Daz store loads automatically with HD and SubD cranked up giving it 5.5 million polys, which is unnecessary except for really tight close ups, and even with HD and SubD off it is still 1.7 million - way too many to justify, almost like it's been sculpted but not retopologized.
Hoping DS will have a particle system for hair built in before too long. Till then, I'm not sure there is a ready solution to the performance hit for larger areas. The underlying problem is DS can only handle so much geometry on most 'home' computers.
That is very odd - would you post a screenshot of what you do have please.
alright, there's not much to see.
well that sucks, I've yet to really find a good polygon based hair tutorial (outside of the charm hair one for hexagon) and i've yet to really figure out the texture making.
hmm - that looks to me as if the item doesn't actually have any geometry, at least polygons. If you go to Window>Panes(Tabs)>Scene Info does that show any polygons?
it shows there are 50 vertices, but 0 total faces.
I think you need to look at the process of generating the mesh in Blender, to make sure you end up with polygons (or polylines if you are using the 4.11.0.136 Public beta).
Have a look here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/70373/how-to-convert-hair-particles
I put hair on a cube, then exported both cube and hair mesh as OBJs and imported into DS. See attached. There are two surface - 'Material' for the cube, 'None' for the hair, which I made red and blue for clarity. This amounts to just over 40k quads/100k verts, not as bad as I expected for (only) 1000 hairs, but they are just dead straight with no geometry to allow them to bend at all which helps the vert count.
I'm not familiar with polylines, so it would be interesting to know what results can be achieved with them.
Sounds like Daz is just throwing-out the additional data that it can not convert into something it can use. Like it was stated before, you need to find an export setting that exports polygons or poly-lines. (I wasn't aware that Daz could render just a single poly-line, but if Rich says that is a possibility, that might be your best bet.)
Even if it is a polygon, if the formula data is not able to be used, it will never display as you want. It will just display as lines or dots or place-holders [nodes].
Have you looked at the "look at my hair" tool? (Though I think that only works for 3DeLight. Don't quote me on that. I see videos where they have to convert the hair to OBJ format, so I assume he still has not updated the tool yet.)
Iray is capable of rendering this kind of hair, but Daz, the controller of the renderer, is apparently not, for the blender-code you are using.
Another example, this time with a bit of curl added in Blender and thinner strands to make it more like hair. No subd applied so still (only) 100k verts/40k quads, but it looks jagged close up and and definitely a bit sparse. It does not render quickly in Iray either.
Can't attach the file for some reason as I could less than 24 hrs ago, so I've put it in my gallery. I'll try and attach it here later (it's only 169kb).
seems to work without reducing performance to bad, thanks. I'll need to experiment with it a lot though.