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Daz Studio is free. They have added Strand-Based hair creation for free. Are you looking that gift-horse in the mouth? You are free to use other software packages instead, if they give you more of what you want. Sure, I'd like to have the ability to try and create my own dForce hair, but I'm grateful for the excellent free Daz Studio 4.11 that we received.
+1
My technique is to use an animated simulation of 15 - 30 frames in the timeline versus the default "from memorized pose" so I can give a specific starting pose to the head such as a tilt or bend (sometimes even more torso bends) so that hair has a chance to fall into the right position as the final pose is gradually achieved. It takes a little longer than the default simulation, but it gives much more control over the final look.
This is a good start and it's on sale: https://www.daz3d.com/modeling-with-littlefox-4-hair-modeling
It covers the basics of building hair from polygon strips. In addition to zbrush, I use UV Layout Pro to get the UV's to be nice and retangular which makes applying transparancies and textures for realistic effects. You'll find many of the "tradional" (e.g. not stand based) hairs use similar techniques. When I need to adjust one, I just jump into zbrush with DAZ Studios GoZ setup, make adjustments with one of the move brushes, and then pop it back to DAZ Studio as a morph.
Another handy tool is polygon strip IMM brush from NasconeArt. This brush generates polygon strips along curves to simplify building up a head of hair.
-K
but those are all supported by sales of the software, or donations to the software project, not sales of content. I don't know that that is the reason for the decision, though.
With all due respect, my bank account is evidence that Daz Studio is anything but "free."
Before I begin:
I applaud DAZ for giving the strand-based hair tool to new users and Iray users for free. It's a generous move. These systems are damn fun to play with even without dynamics.
But it's just a bit sad that we non-PAs cannot buy access to the dForce hair creation tool, not even for render-only use.
"Best" is highly subjective actually. It's what a lot of us here are trying to say.
Look, we all have preferences in terms of clothing and hair design, whether it's for purely aesthetical reasons or because we work in a specific genre; we all need different things.
PAs also have their own specific preferences.
As a result, sometimes there are no PAs that make models that some of us need.
Remember, there is always talk of "niche" content here, with some people lamenting the absence of this or that type of content, and others explaining that it won't happen because it won't sell.
For example... Yesterday I made a thread asking whether it's possible to turn one of PhilW's new dForce hair models into a layered style. No-one replied. This tells me that it must be a "niche" thing. Out of fashion, or something.
Being a longtime Garibaldi (and LAMH) user, I can and will certainly create my own hair models using the new free tool, but brushing long hair to simulate realistic draping is an arduous task. So if I want to make my life a bit easier via dForce hair, I will need to wait for a PA to release the style I have in mind. The odds of which aren't exactly high.
So - I for one understand why DAZ decided to keep the tool PA-only. I do shop elsewhere a _lot_, aesthetic preferences and all, so trying to get "traitors" like me to spend more here is understandable.
But I won't be buying content I have no real use for, even if it uses technology not available elsewhere.
I was a bit surprised to see a hair creation tool inside of Daz Studio at all. There are no other "production" tools inside the software. Stuff has to be made in other applications and then imported. I'm more bewildered by that than dForce hair being PA-only.
Making good looking hair takes a lot of work that most people lack the time or patience for. People were going to be buying these hairs like hotcakes any way you took at it.
Poser and Carrara have both had strand based hair for the better part of a decade. In fact Daz hair is literally the Garabaldi plugin that was first released during the Genesis 1 generation with dForce and some refinements.
Feature wise, Daz is actually well behind the curve. Both Carrara and Poser have soft body dynamics and a proper physics engine.
The only real advantages Daz has that is free to start and Daz's base figures tend to be better than the compititions.
I'd buy that for a dollar!
If you look at the surface tab for the dForce strand based hair, you will notice that the dForce hairs have the same tweaking contorls that are in the hair editor. So while it lacks bones that standared modeled hair has, its does have unique features that modeled hair does not.
I am curious what hardware you have for running dForce. I use that hair a lot and even with a wind node in the scene, it takes maybe 2 - 5min for a good drape. I use to have issues with it looking flat but then I messed around with it and found that if you set collision to better or best, that it collides correctly and looks better. It also responds to wind nodes better. Also, did you watch the videos that came with the hair? I dont recall which hair video it was but one of Linday's vids for one of their dForce hairs states that you can change teh wind resistance in the dForce tab to 10 to avoid all the floating hairs. I tend to turn gravity up to 2 as well.
One of my issues is I'm doing 80s inspired renders.
It's been my experience that Linday's hair does not "do" hairspray...
guess it depends on the style you want. All morphing functions can be made to go beyond limits. Its just a matter if that will break it or not. I do find that if you need better quality (safer) drapping out of dforce, you are better to set the mesh res to view port and the collision mode to better or best.
Perhaps. I wasn't remarking that dForce strand-based hair doesn't have lots of tweaking controls--there are certainly a good selection of parameters. What dforce strand hair doesn't have is any way to control how the hair breaks around things, like ears. In my testing, I couldn't get "Longdrape hair" to break around elf ears properly. It wanted to soly go over the ears, more like a helmet than flow around the ears. In tradition hair models, this wasn't a problem to correct: I could easily use GoZ and move the polygon strip to give it a natural flow (a la Arwen from LOTR)... With strand based hair, I need to move the strands to flow around the ear, not over it, but because the tools are forbidden to me, I can't. Hence, the lack of tooling makes the dForce hair less usable to me because the I can't adjust the strands guiding the hair flow (like in many other rendering applications as others have pointed out.)
A note: Wind nodes can be used to tweak hair. Same with moving colliders and similar, much like pinning and other approaches used with cloth.
That’s a really good idea! I hadn’t thought to create some streamlined invisible ear shields to help how the hair falls. Thanks!
-K
Sorry I forgot to mention the wind node. I use it on the Linday dForce hairs but have not tried it yet on the dForce strand based hair to compare
Hmmm. that's interesting. Almost makes me want to check out dForce hair but I can't do so anyway so I guess I won't.
And BOOM! There it is in a nutshell, this is WHY people are ticked off.
You see I CAN'T "create my own content", because I WASN"T ALLOWED ACCESS TO THE TOOLS TO DO SO!
Plain and simple, but that is the root of why people are disgruntled. Have a shiney new toolbox with no tools in it, have a brand new car with no stearing wheel, have the ability to make great looking static hair with no way to effectively change it with a new pose. This is why people are starting to say..."eh, what, gee that's rather lacking."
I have to agree with folks, DAZ is free, DAZ makes software for development purposes, okay, get it. Also have to jump on the bandwagon of people saying they would PAY for the tool set to make strand based hair contructs dForce compliant. Yes DAZ, I would be willing to PAY for that.
$0.02
I've only hopped into this after the actual release, I was a little dissapointed about the dForce hair being a use only and not create
feature as the release trailer video led me to believe. Still pretty happy with the addition of strand based hair though, and I will be purchasing
philWs femme fatale hair soon.
Can anyone please clarify about new hair and Octane? I bought 'Foreground Blends' by esha hoping it will help me with HDRIs in Octane, but that grass is dForce grass and it doesn't appear in Octane for me at all.
Well you can not discount the rigging and weight mapping tools, those are content creation / production tools!
I can't verify this, but does Octane perhaps work via export rather than as a true renderer/ if so you need the Preview PR Hairs On under the Line Tessellation settings in the Parameters pane.
Check the tesselation view in parameters but the UV mapping will only be vertical if it even UV maps not the dual lobe pelted so in the material node editor you may need to add a UV projection other than mesh XYZ to UVW might be best
At that price, I don't think anyone would object.
I'm trying to render Big Cat 2 with Oso's dForce fur, but the render windows remains empty, and it causes my driver to freeze. I tried updating my 1080 Ti to the latest driver, but the problem remains. Anything else I could try to make it work?
Make sure you are using 4.11 and have updated drivers.
I developed my dForce stuff using GTX 970, so the demand for hardware isn't super high.
LoL, naw that was my $0.02 on the subject
Because nobody will buy Dforce clothing if they can make their own
Because everyone bought lots of Optitex clothing when that was limited by an extremely pricey software entry
Because this model of marketing worked so well in the past
Because Poser and Carrara have had fully user simulatable dynamic hair for 10 years yet I have purchased many commercialy made presets for both
Because the fact it is limited to PA’s has resulted in me buying zero Dforce hairs the same as I used to hold off on buying Optitex and HD morphs
don’t worry PhilW I bought more or your Carrara hairs recently, they are awesome
I also buy much by other PA’s who are selling Dforce hair just not the hair as I customise my stuff, said hairs by Phil get edited in Carrara they are a starting base but this is denied us in DAZ studio too by this decision, for that matter Dforce clothing works great with Virtual World dynamics, I mix and match my tools and softwares and buy a hell of a lot of DAZ content but stuff that cannot be adapted like this Dforce hair will be left on the shelf.
I'm sorry but I just don't understand why Daz should spend all the development cost to create this, then either HAVE to give it away or alternatively sell it. There are lots of tools out there, Blender has a plethora that are free. We got some new tools, yet folks seem to be complaing about what they haven't got, as opposed to figuring out what they can do with what they have got.
I mean they haven't introduced something that affects existing content, or what can be done with new content purchased; they've produced new tools, one of which they chose to restrict - makes sense tbh, they don't want the deveopment of said tool to be used to create items that are sold elsewhere. The presumably hope to recover the development costs and make a profit, some of which will get re-invested.