dForce Hair (as well as strand based hair and the strand based hair editor) in public beta

nicstt

Evenios said:

why is this thread stil active? the public beta is now of 412 lol

i find dforce hair to take so long to process at least for me. maybe ill try it again sometimes. but it seems as others have said the less complex something is in dforce the better off you are.

 

Some are quicker than other, with the quickest taking seconds.

kyoto kid

...so wondering why when I apply a custom pose that I saved as a pose preset, the hair I created doesn't remain parented to the character?  Is there some trick to this?  It works fine with stock poses.

Asari

kyoto kid said:

...so wondering why when I apply a custom pose that I saved as a pose preset, the hair I created doesn't remain parented to the character?  Is there some trick to this?  It works fine with stock poses.

Did you encounter this with dforce hair or SBH hair?

kyoto kid

...SBH hair.  I don't use dForce because it is too much of a system resource hog for my older hardware. 

Richard Haseltine

kyoto kid said:

...so wondering why when I apply a custom pose that I saved as a pose preset, the hair I created doesn't remain parented to the character?  Is there some trick to this?  It works fine with stock poses.

What do you mean - that applying a pose preset is unparenting the hair?

Asari

Um Strange ... SBH should move with genesis if you parented it. Have you tried the following - apply pose for genesis and if the SBH does not move along, select the head, and try to pose the head separately with tone pose dial? If the hair follows along now you can undo your pose changes.

jestmart

The disadvantage to parenting hair to a figure is that while it will adapt with scaling on the figure it will not adapt with many morphs that change shape and size of head.

tinkstar_8a2fb05047

does anyone get to export the sbh as obj i have tried to export an animl w/sbh as obj fur does not show up when opend in vue.I use LAMH & export as obj from daz to vue and it shows its just usuaaly a very very large file but at least it shows in vue

L'Adair

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

does anyone get to export the sbh as obj i have tried to export an animl w/sbh as obj fur does not show up when opend in vue.I use LAMH & export as obj from daz to vue and it shows its just usuaaly a very very large file but at least it shows in vue

@tinkstar_8a2fb05047

To export SBH hair as an object, you need to turn on the the preview and set the tesselation to greater than 1, I believe. I don't have The Beast on yet, so I can't look up the actual names of the settings. They are found in the Parameters pane/tab when the Strand-Based Hair is selected. Give me a minute or three, and I'll find the exact settings…

ETA: I hid all but the Strand-Based Hair parameters to create this image for you:

The settings you need to set/change to export SBH as an object are found under Line Tessellation:

• Preview PR Hairs: On
• Render Line Tessellation Sides: >1 (2 will work, 3 will look better. However, the higher this value, the more polygons your object will have.)

(This is based on information I've read in the forums. I haven't actually tried exporting SBH to OBJ.)

kyoto kid

...I wasn't exporting as a .obj.  It just wasn't staying attached to the character when I applied the saved custom pose preset.  As I mentioned it worked fine with pose content from the store (I experimented with a number of different ones). I finally did find out the solution after a lot of testing (late into the night and early morning) and that was to not manually change the parenting as I was doing.

It is odd that some hair content shows as being separate from the figure in the Scene Tab while others only show when you expand the figure tree. Not sure what causes this.

L'Adair

kyoto kid said:

...I wasn't exporting as a .obj.  It just wasn't staying attached to the character when I applied the saved custom pose preset.  As I mentioned it worked fine with pose content from the store (I experimented with a number of different ones). I finally did find out the solution after a lot of testing (late into the night and early morning) and that was to not manually change the parenting as I was doing.

It is odd that some hair content shows as being separate from the figure in the Scene Tab while others only show when you expand the figure tree. Not sure what causes this.

kyoto kid, I was answering tinkstar with my post, but it got me thinking about your issue, too. Bear with me for a minute.

Have you seen my thread on Jepe's Roderick including SB Hair? The third post down, missuskisses details steps to use these presets with other G8M characters. When I was creating the image I used in my previous post, I noticed the Parameters setting Apply Transformation. So I went back to the Roderick thread and reread the steps. One of those is to set Apply Transformation to On with the parented SBH object selected.

Like wardrobe and hair, SBH objects can be "Fit to" a character without actually being parented. I think the SBH object is created without parenting, but when applying it to a new character of the same gender/generation, it would seem it does need to be parented.

Anyway, when you apply a pose and the hair doesn't move with it, try setting Apply Transformation and see if that fixes the issue for you. Or parent it first and then turn the setting to On. I think it's worth trying, anyway.

tinkstar_8a2fb05047

L'Adair said:

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

does anyone get to export the sbh as obj i have tried to export an animl w/sbh as obj fur does not show up when opend in vue.I use LAMH & export as obj from daz to vue and it shows its just usuaaly a very very large file but at least it shows in vue

@tinkstar_8a2fb05047

To export SBH hair as an object, you need to turn on the the preview and set the tesselation to greater than 1, I believe. I don't have The Beast on yet, so I can't look up the actual names of the settings. They are found in the Parameters pane/tab when the Strand-Based Hair is selected. Give me a minute or three, and I'll find the exact settings…

ETA: I hid all but the Strand-Based Hair parameters to create this image for you:

The settings you need to set/change to export SBH as an object are found under Line Tessellation:

• Preview PR Hairs: On
• Render Line Tessellation Sides: >1 (2 will work, 3 will look better. However, the higher this value, the more polygons your object will have.)

(This is based on information I've read in the forums. I haven't actually tried exporting SBH to OBJ.)

 

L'Adair said:

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

does anyone get to export the sbh as obj i have tried to export an animl w/sbh as obj fur does not show up when opend in vue.I use LAMH & export as obj from daz to vue and it shows its just usuaaly a very very large file but at least it shows in vue

@tinkstar_8a2fb05047

To export SBH hair as an object, you need to turn on the the preview and set the tesselation to greater than 1, I believe. I don't have The Beast on yet, so I can't look up the actual names of the settings. They are found in the Parameters pane/tab when the Strand-Based Hair is selected. Give me a minute or three, and I'll find the exact settings…

ETA: I hid all but the Strand-Based Hair parameters to create this image for you:

The settings you need to set/change to export SBH as an object are found under Line Tessellation:

• Preview PR Hairs: On
• Render Line Tessellation Sides: >1 (2 will work, 3 will look better. However, the higher this value, the more polygons your object will have.)

(This is based on information I've read in the forums. I haven't actually tried exporting SBH to OBJ.)

it still doesnt export I have posted this issue in my other post LAMH exports nicely as obj to use in vue but as of now sbh doesnt

tinkstar_8a2fb05047

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

L'Adair said:

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

does anyone get to export the sbh as obj i have tried to export an animl w/sbh as obj fur does not show up when opend in vue.I use LAMH & export as obj from daz to vue and it shows its just usuaaly a very very large file but at least it shows in vue

@tinkstar_8a2fb05047

To export SBH hair as an object, you need to turn on the the preview and set the tesselation to greater than 1, I believe. I don't have The Beast on yet, so I can't look up the actual names of the settings. They are found in the Parameters pane/tab when the Strand-Based Hair is selected. Give me a minute or three, and I'll find the exact settings…

ETA: I hid all but the Strand-Based Hair parameters to create this image for you:

The settings you need to set/change to export SBH as an object are found under Line Tessellation:

• Preview PR Hairs: On
• Render Line Tessellation Sides: >1 (2 will work, 3 will look better. However, the higher this value, the more polygons your object will have.)

(This is based on information I've read in the forums. I haven't actually tried exporting SBH to OBJ.)

 

L'Adair said:

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

does anyone get to export the sbh as obj i have tried to export an animl w/sbh as obj fur does not show up when opend in vue.I use LAMH & export as obj from daz to vue and it shows its just usuaaly a very very large file but at least it shows in vue

@tinkstar_8a2fb05047

To export SBH hair as an object, you need to turn on the the preview and set the tesselation to greater than 1, I believe. I don't have The Beast on yet, so I can't look up the actual names of the settings. They are found in the Parameters pane/tab when the Strand-Based Hair is selected. Give me a minute or three, and I'll find the exact settings…

ETA: I hid all but the Strand-Based Hair parameters to create this image for you:

The settings you need to set/change to export SBH as an object are found under Line Tessellation:

• Preview PR Hairs: On
• Render Line Tessellation Sides: >1 (2 will work, 3 will look better. However, the higher this value, the more polygons your object will have.)

(This is based on information I've read in the forums. I haven't actually tried exporting SBH to OBJ.)

it still doesnt export I have posted this issue in my other post LAMH exports nicely as obj to use in vue but as of now sbh doesnt,tried  with tessellation at 2 now its a 3.3gb file too much to load it vue it stalled.tessellation at 1 exported no fur

 

L'Adair

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

it still doesnt export I have posted this issue in my other post LAMH exports nicely as obj to use in vue but as of now sbh doesnt,

I just tested this with hair I created based on the Mohawk provided in the dForce Essentials, with Render Line Tessellation Sides: 3. It appeared to stall at 97% but I let it continue and it did complete. I had no issue importing it back into Daz Studio. I do not have Vue, so I can't test that. The obj file size is over 1GB.

tinkstar_8a2fb05047 said:

tried  with tessellation at 2 now its a 3.3gb file too much to load it vue it stalled.tessellation at 1 exported no fur

As I mentioned, to export to obj, Render Line Tessellation Sides must be greater than 1. So a setting of 2 or more is required. I think what you will need to do is break things up by region. That may be easier said than done, but if your animal has multiple material zones, it may be possible to export the hair for a given zone at one time. So theoretically, export the fur for the head, (hiding everything else,) and then export the fur for the tail, and finally the fur for the body. If the body fur is too big a file, maybe break that up into stomach fur and then the rest of the body.

Then when you import into Vue, you'll be looking at the same total file size, but with several "smaller" files instead of one, 3.3GB file.

StripesWaterkat

I'm gonna stick this here, I hope its the right place.

I'm still playing with strand based hair, trying to figure it out. I placed a texture in the color settings for the hair, tiger like orange with white chest, but all I'm getting is black fur. It renders fine, I'm just not getting the pattern on the texture. What am I missing?

Thanks.

nonesuch00

StripesWaterkat said:

I'm gonna stick this here, I hope its the right place.

I'm still playing with strand based hair, trying to figure it out. I placed a texture in the color settings for the hair, tiger like orange with white chest, but all I'm getting is black fur. It renders fine, I'm just not getting the pattern on the texture. What am I missing?

Thanks.

OK, I just asked the same question and the answer given is in this comment.

Here is a quote of his answer.

The only way I know of to do it would be to apply the polka dot pattern to the figure’s diffuse map and put that map in the SBH’s root and tip maps. 

 

lilweep

There is not enough SBH discourse on this forum...

barbult

lilweep said:

There is not enough SBH discourse on this forum...

Well, this thread is 42 pages long, so there is that.
As far as I know, there haven't been any SBH updates or bug fixes since 4.11 have there? No documentation was released either, as far as I know. I'd love to be shown otherwise on both accounts, though.

Masterstroke

Not yet a fan of DForce strand based hair. Most of those hairs in the shop still looks like cotton candy to me. ( In the promos, and in my renders.) I am also missing the styling options I am used to have with geometry based hair.
DForce stuff is under constant development, so I am quite optimistic to see improvements. DForce hair is for sure the path to go though.

Asari

I love SBH. But the SBH editor is difficult to handle. And its not the issue that you need to figure things out for yourself due to a lack of documentation. Some features are more complicated and more difficult to use than needed be, I feel. My main issue is the clump feature. This is a very useful and essential feature. I dare say you have to use it in order to get realistic human head hair and if you don't use it the hair will look like a pile of garn with more reflections. But the fact that you can manipulate the style curves in the style tab only and put clump on top of it makes it very hard to control where your hair goes and how it behaves.

The original workflow was intended to style the hair first and then to clump it. But after clump your hairstyle can look fundamentally different than your hair viewed in the style tab. You can't guess how your hair is supposed to look like by the preview in the style tab alone.

I wish there were a feature where we could manipulate the clump curves directly, like we can manipulate the style curves. That would make creating hair much easier because you don't have to guess for yourself which style curve is responsible for which clump curve to behave like that and so on.

barbult

Asari said:

I love SBH. But the SBH editor is difficult to handle. And its not the issue that you need to figure things out for yourself due to a lack of documentation. Some features are more complicated and more difficult to use than needed be, I feel. My main issue is the clump feature. This is a very useful and essential feature. I dare say you have to use it in order to get realistic human head hair and if you don't use it the hair will look like a pile of garn with more reflections. But the fact that you can manipulate the style curves in the style tab only and put clump on top of it makes it very hard to control where your hair goes and how it behaves.

The original workflow was intended to style the hair first and then to clump it. But after clump your hairstyle can look fundamentally different than your hair viewed in the style tab. You can't guess how your hair is supposed to look like by the preview in the style tab alone.

I wish there were a feature where we could manipulate the clump curves directly, like we can manipulate the style curves. That would make creating hair much easier because you don't have to guess for yourself which style curve is responsible for which clump curve to behave like that and so on.

You are absolutely correct in that critique. Please submit that as a feature request by submitting a help request. Who knows whether it will get any attention, but it is sure an excellent suggestion.

nonesuch00

Asari said:

I love SBH. But the SBH editor is difficult to handle. And its not the issue that you need to figure things out for yourself due to a lack of documentation. Some features are more complicated and more difficult to use than needed be, I feel. My main issue is the clump feature. This is a very useful and essential feature. I dare say you have to use it in order to get realistic human head hair and if you don't use it the hair will look like a pile of garn with more reflections. But the fact that you can manipulate the style curves in the style tab only and put clump on top of it makes it very hard to control where your hair goes and how it behaves.

 

The original workflow was intended to style the hair first and then to clump it. But after clump your hairstyle can look fundamentally different than your hair viewed in the style tab. You can't guess how your hair is supposed to look like by the preview in the style tab alone.

 

I wish there were a feature where we could manipulate the clump curves directly, like we can manipulate the style curves. That would make creating hair much easier because you don't have to guess for yourself which style curve is responsible for which clump curve to behave like that and so on.

I wrote a feature request ticket and it was accepted & I'm hopeful but they need to allow us with SBH to select subsets of hair like a hair stylist and then describe via successive mathematical formulas how we want that section styled, much like a real hair stylist would do. Being able to use curling irons, different sizes of curlers, hair straighteners, hair dyes, mouse & other thing like hair spray all are needed. Those are fundamental.

bbaluchon

Hello Folks,

Having some difficulties with SBH, I'll ask kindly is there are answers to some of my issues for now :

- Is there a way to thicken hair (to make fur for example) with a shader, and without having millions of polys ? For example I set the hair amount very sparse, with only strands for center of tufts, and a shader could simulate the thickness in render ?
I saw something similar with furry characters, don"t know if it's possible to use this shader without dForce (Gonna try maybe).

- When editing hair, it looks like "clump" settings, wich is nice for what I need, is somehow erased by other settings ; I made some adjustements in the first slider, but it looks like to bug somehow, and all clump disappear without being seen again, impossible to reset them right - "clump 1" sliders are now inefficient, and I dont know why... :/
Is there a workaround for that ?

- When my hair/fur is complete, I got a somehow unparented hair item : when trying to parent/fit to my cloak mesh (the one from wich I created the hair), DS crash if PBR preview is ON. So I disabled the preview to only keep the simple lines, and it parented to my cloak.
But ! When saving my cloak as a figure asset (I used transfer utility of course to make it a wearable to G8), only base cloak mesh is saved, not the parented fur. I wonder is the fur need to be transfered as well (but to the cloak this time), and if this operation will retain editing for hair ?

- After fitting my cloak + fur on another character with morphs, it ok, the fur correctly follow cloak deformations. Line preview looks good.
But (again) ! As soon I turn PBR rendering ON, the fur could not follow any transformation (movement, orientation and scale) or the character, despite being fitted to my base cloak ; It looks like movements are "amplified", for instance if I scale the character to 150%, the fur got 300% bigger... Same for any posing wich imply any movement from 0/0/0 position... It looks like exactly when I import a morph on a figure wich is not on the zero position ; maybe I'll have to zero my character before fitting the hair on cloak, but it's somehow strange.
Any other idea about what may be causing this ?

Basically, mostly everything is nice before fitting to needed item/character. I can provide the file to see what is going wrong.
Thanks !

lilweep

bbaluchon said:

- When editing hair, it looks like "clump" settings, wich is nice for what I need, is somehow erased by other settings ; I made some adjustements in the first slider, but it looks like to bug somehow, and all clump disappear without being seen again, impossible to reset them right - "clump 1" sliders are now inefficient, and I dont know why... :/

Is there a workaround for that ?

There seems to be a lot of bugs like this for me too when going back and forwards through the workflow, especially with style curves. I find it best to just go through each step one by one and try to limit how many times i go back to adjust previous tabs of the workflow.  Maybe more advanced users have some more insights on this matter.

- When my hair/fur is complete, I got a somehow unparented hair item : when trying to parent/fit to my cloak mesh (the one from wich I created the hair), DS crash if PBR preview is ON. So I disabled the preview to only keep the simple lines, and it parented to my cloak.
But ! When saving my cloak as a figure asset (I used transfer utility of course to make it a wearable to G8), only base cloak mesh is saved, not the parented fur. I wonder is the fur need to be transfered as well (but to the cloak this time), and if this operation will retain editing for hair ?

SBH items are supposed to be left as 'unparented' assets.  You choose which item the SBH is fitted to under parameters 'fit to...'.  When you create the SBH you must choose which item it is fitted to before you can paint, so you should not have to do anything else.  It should move with the asset it is fitted to while unparented.

- After fitting my cloak + fur on another character with morphs, it ok, the fur correctly follow cloak deformations. Line preview looks good.
But (again) ! As soon I turn PBR rendering ON, the fur could not follow any transformation (movement, orientation and scale) or the character, despite being fitted to my base cloak ; It looks like movements are "amplified", for instance if I scale the character to 150%, the fur got 300% bigger... Same for any posing wich imply any movement from 0/0/0 position... It looks like exactly when I import a morph on a figure wich is not on the zero position ; maybe I'll have to zero my character before fitting the hair on cloak, but it's somehow strange.
Any other idea about what may be causing this ?

I dont know about this, could be due to the fact that SBH hair should be unparented.  Maybe try that before making any morph/scale adjustments.

Richard Haseltine

nonesuch00 said:

Asari said:

I love SBH. But the SBH editor is difficult to handle. And its not the issue that you need to figure things out for yourself due to a lack of documentation. Some features are more complicated and more difficult to use than needed be, I feel. My main issue is the clump feature. This is a very useful and essential feature. I dare say you have to use it in order to get realistic human head hair and if you don't use it the hair will look like a pile of garn with more reflections. But the fact that you can manipulate the style curves in the style tab only and put clump on top of it makes it very hard to control where your hair goes and how it behaves.

 

The original workflow was intended to style the hair first and then to clump it. But after clump your hairstyle can look fundamentally different than your hair viewed in the style tab. You can't guess how your hair is supposed to look like by the preview in the style tab alone.

 

I wish there were a feature where we could manipulate the clump curves directly, like we can manipulate the style curves. That would make creating hair much easier because you don't have to guess for yourself which style curve is responsible for which clump curve to behave like that and so on.

I wrote a feature request ticket and it was accepted & I'm hopeful but they need to allow us with SBH to select subsets of hair like a hair stylist and then describe via successive mathematical formulas how we want that section styled, much like a real hair stylist would do. Being able to use curling irons, different sizes of curlers, hair straighteners, hair dyes, mouse & other thing like hair spray all are needed. Those are fundamental.

Accepted as a valid request doe not mean it will be implemented, that will be decided by the product management team. But it has, prsumably, been added to the list that the team will review.

bbaluchon

lilweep said:

I dont know about this, could be due to the fact that SBH hair should be unparented.  Maybe try that before making any morph/scale adjustments.

Thanks for the tip, it worked !
Looks like SBH need to be totally unparented in the hierarchy (root level) to work properly, even being part of a group isnt working for proper fitting.
Only "fit to/Base parent" settings need to be correct, and the thing is working... magic !

Now, some feedback from my early tests (please let me know if there is more fitting topic for feedback/requests about this specific feature) :
PROS :
- Simple and efficient approach, mostly clear interface with many indepth options (like selections and graymaps, didnt tested them yet).
- Dynamic assets that move in a realistic fashion when posing base mesh, even without dForce ; only roots are moving, wich prevent stretching and oddities. Great !
- Creation on the spot, on any surface, is veeery nice
- Ability to edit all settings at any time may be the best feature of the tool, a thing we just couldnt do with Zbrush or any other external fibermesh (both in Zbrush, and after exportation in OBJ). Best part is all settings are preserved when saving as asset, allowing easy shift/morph of basemesh when needed.

CONS :
- Issues with roots orientation over the surface (see below), wich cause trouble when working with "sheet" style hair (fur and other thick patterns are hard to get properly). Especially problematic when backside need to be visible (like a fur cloak).
- Lack of styling tools at the moment (only comb-style brush, wich is nice but trimming/clumping/shortening hair is difficult
- graymaps dont looks intuitive to use if they work as alpha/masks
- Painting and selecting will need lasso and rectangle options
- Painting is limited to one figure, wich is an issue when trying to paint hair over geograft parts.
- Inability to save both mesh + HBS asset at once, since unparenting the hair is mandatory
- Hair-Based Strand shader looks like to do nothing, only the first (Dual Lobe) material looks to have any effect. Shader abreviations (D, R, O, TT, etc.) are cryptic.
- Dual-lobe hair shader doesnt allow refraction, wich I think is a major component of hair in general (hair is not totally opaque, and opacity channel is not the best as workaround).

Suggested Features to add :
- Options to get regular hair implantation and orientation (straight, curved, perpendicular/parralel to surface, lines/rows etc), wich will be useful to get scale/mail/leaves regular patterns (again, see below)
- We also need an option to use thick and flat section, again to make properly textured scales, leaves and other flat patterns ; the 2-sided geometry doesnt have thickness (so no backface), and using 4-sided is making square sections. Also, an option to close the root and tip holes could be useful for those features ; now we can work with bricks instead of flat panes.
- Curve-profile for width and lenght, to get closer to intended shape (for fur and other bizarre experimentations)
- More brushing tools ; attraction brush, gravity, fuzziness, shorten, lenghten, flatten, straighten, etc.
- Grouped SBH meshes ; selecting multiple connecting figures (geograft + base figure), paint over seamlessly, then each hair part is split and fitted to corresponding part. This way we could still edit the whole thing, but it will not mess with morphs, since each hair zone is following one figure.

Some tests, with (as you can see) limitations for unusual materials :

nonesuch00

Richard Haseltine said:

nonesuch00 said:

Asari said:

I love SBH. But the SBH editor is difficult to handle. And its not the issue that you need to figure things out for yourself due to a lack of documentation. Some features are more complicated and more difficult to use than needed be, I feel. My main issue is the clump feature. This is a very useful and essential feature. I dare say you have to use it in order to get realistic human head hair and if you don't use it the hair will look like a pile of garn with more reflections. But the fact that you can manipulate the style curves in the style tab only and put clump on top of it makes it very hard to control where your hair goes and how it behaves.

 

The original workflow was intended to style the hair first and then to clump it. But after clump your hairstyle can look fundamentally different than your hair viewed in the style tab. You can't guess how your hair is supposed to look like by the preview in the style tab alone.

 

I wish there were a feature where we could manipulate the clump curves directly, like we can manipulate the style curves. That would make creating hair much easier because you don't have to guess for yourself which style curve is responsible for which clump curve to behave like that and so on.

I wrote a feature request ticket and it was accepted & I'm hopeful but they need to allow us with SBH to select subsets of hair like a hair stylist and then describe via successive mathematical formulas how we want that section styled, much like a real hair stylist would do. Being able to use curling irons, different sizes of curlers, hair straighteners, hair dyes, mouse & other thing like hair spray all are needed. Those are fundamental.

Accepted as a valid request doe not mean it will be implemented, that will be decided by the product management team. But it has, prsumably, been added to the list that the team will review.

That's all good and fine but hair creation tool that doesn't allow one to easily section and style the hair isn't going to be very useful to users of DAZ Studio.

nonesuch00

Leonides02 said:

Joepingleton said:

Since a lot of people have been asking me about my process I thought I would share some of my discoveries from my experiment with using Strand Based Hair for creating fur so far. I just started playing with Strand Based Hair in the latest beta and since there is no real documentation I have been making every mistake imaginable. I was getting so frustrated with my first experiments that I completely changed my approach. I decided to use information from the Wikipedia entry on fur to create a Down hair, Awn hair and Guard hair set of hairs, each with different hair style settings and densities. This allowed me to use a lot fewer hairs than my previous experiments and thus it requires fewer resources. Mother nature seems to know best.

In a nutshell, I use a density map to control the distribution of the hair (this seems to be the key to getting realistic hair coverage) and adjust the length using the "Reduce Length" slider under the "TWEAK" tab

I create a fluffy "Down" hair coat with lots of thin hairs curved and attracted to the body. Then I create an "Awn" hair coat that has about half as many hairs and has a wider and longer hair with some fuzziness and a slight curve to it. Lastly, I create a "Guard" hair coat that is about 1/6 the number of hairs of the "Down" coat and is slightly longer than the "awn" coat.

I was running into the problems of having the fur turn out too dark and the whites not holding their values the more hair I put on the figure. So I went through and changed all the textures maps to be lighter, this helped but was a pain to do for everything and only partially solved the problem. I recently discovered some settings that got better results and just used the original texture maps. Basically, I use texture maps on the "Transmission Color", "Hair Color", and "Hair Highlight" roots and tips. Then I change the "Highlight Weight", "Anisotropy" and "Anisotropy Rotation" to zero. (See the attached screenshot for my latest settings)

I am still working on the process but it seems to be getting a little better each experiment. I can provide more info if you would like to know more. It would be very interesting to see what someone who knows what they are doing thinks about this process or if they have a better method.

Stellar info, Joepingleton. Thank you so much for sharing!!!

Yeah, thanks for the tips @JoePingleton

May Dawney

PhilW said:

I have just submitted my second dForce Hair, a thick and wavy drapeable style with lots of options, called Femme Fatale Hair. Here is a quick preview.

I LOVE this hair! Thanks so much <3 Silly question, but what's the see-through top thiny you're using here?

lana_lass

Hey all!

 

I'm having an issue with loading this gorgeous hair and thought maybe somebody here could help. Sorry if this has been queried and answered already. For some reason, when I'm applying Femme Fatale even just to a base, 100% untouched G8F model, rather than look like Veronica Lake she's looking like Sideshow Bob (see attached)... 

 

Not such a great look  I've had a look at the readme etc and can't figure out what it is I'm doing wrong (or not doing right) but no doubt it's something on my end. Can any of you kind folks lend a hand with some pointers? Thanks in advance!

 

 

EDIT/UPDATE: Oh, wow, duh. So right after posting this the obvious dawned on me: this is a d-force hair so needs to be simulated. FACE PALM! How embarrassing, but I'll leave the post here if acceptable to mods in case anyone else makes the same silly mistake and comes here looking for an answer :)