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I will be testing to create the strand based for some time until I decide, so far it doesn't seem to kill my not so optimal system so thats a go for me, but then I've been saturated with hair for the characters I use. the d-force hair will have to wait
Since the average head ranges between 80k-150k hair folicles on the scalp, all of which one would ideally want to make dynamic... and of course with multiple characters on the screen at the same time, with accompanying complexity in things like cloth etc... Full reality is a way off and will end up moving in step fashion to that point. At which stair on the staircase any given person finds useful will depend on them and the particular circumstances. tldr, it will be a mixed environment for most people for a while as even when hero characters can support good strand tech, mid-ground and background characters will be using simpler constructs.
Not to let you dazzers down .. But strand-based hair is quite the standard in professional 3d apps and so far daz was stone-age with its alpha-mapped hair assets. That's also why the Blender importer features a tool to convert alpha-mapped hair to strand-based hair.
If designed and implemented correctly strand-based hair is the only way to go for photorealism. Also it takes far less vram because you don't need large textures for them to work fine. And they can animate far better than alpha-mapped hair. Of course proper optimization of the physics engine is needed for fibers, but this should be done already in 4.11 afaik.
Yawn. Call me when Blender or Maya (...or Carrara) strand-based hair can do this: https://www.daz3d.com/kerkyra-hair
I am taking a wait and see attitude. I purchased the Elyssa Ponytail and Longdrape hair and they work great in some poses and not so much in couples poses as the hair does not properly drape on the other person so there is stil a way to go. There are still limitations.
Do you mean like this ? https://www.pinterest.it/pin/328903579029286454/ .. it wasn't hard to find just googling for maya strand-based hair ..
I should have been more clear, I didn't mean to infer that I like LAMH for human hair - but the animals and creatures are just awesome. I know some people did LAMH for people, but nothing I ever saw really caught my fancy.
Actual braids, not hair twists, sorry for not being specific.
That one is well-done though, and I don't deny that strand-based hair covers a lot of possibilities.
I have spent hours trying
It looks fake, so I certainly hope not.
Certainly if you look at some of what has been done commercially with stand based hair, braids, etc, should be possible. But it may take some new tools to make it work for us. If you think about strand based hair the same way you do real hair, you would have a hard time braiding hair with nothing but a comb and scissors to work with too. :)
Exactly
in Carrara I only get points to pull and they move the whole hair if ik is on or stretch if disabled it could be possible but exceedingly tedious
in Zbrush with the move brush I sort of shaped a lock in a zig zag on one axis and an S bend on the other and duplicated it, all 3 update which is handy but again was extremely tedious and looked crap
Yes, LAMH is totally awesome for animals and creatures. But that doesn't really change my statement. Animals or humans, I still can't do any better in LAMH than in SBH. (Some might even say I do better in SBH as I've actually manage one somewhat decent hair with SBH, albeit starting with the provided Mohawk. The scalp is from Shaved Hair for G3M, not SBH.)
The only thing I've used LAMH successfully for is converting LAMH Presets to Fiber Mesh. With one exception. I also lengthened the fur on a preset for the Hivewire Housecat.
I honestly believe it won't be long before the talented among us figure out how to do something this good. I've always been impressed with the lion Garibaldi featured on the product page, and their website:
It shows just how good Garibaldi works for someone with talent and experience. I expect we'll be seeing this sort of quality output in the near future.
If you've seen Disney's Brave, you know how wonderful Merida's hair was. Pixar actually wrote a new hair simulator just for her curly hair. (link) Getting anything that looks realistic with anything but straight strands is going to be difficult, with any hair creation tool—Unless and until someone develops an "easy button" for braids and Merida-like curls, where you set a guideline and the "button" creates the braid or curl along it. And one then makes changes to the guideline to control density, length, width, and "movement".
(That's a pretty tall order. I wonder if Daz and SBH can do such a thing…?)
Using a wave, kink or frizz shader function like Carrara does could be one way as it actually doesn’t affect the simulation it’s a post effect on the hair curves
IMHO This is where Daz has (once again)
opted for Brute force over modern, intelligent efficiency.
They took the time to develop Dynamic Splines as we have in Maxon C4D.
but apparently they then must be convert to uber dense fiber geometry for
rendering/anmating instead of developing a render engine specific spline shader for the dynamics that never uses/needs actual geometry.
I get this level of performance , while editing dynamic hair,
with C4D's 11 year old, single threaded hair system running on a
year 2007 Macbook with 2 gigs of RAM and no GPU.
I get it... Daz studio is "free"
However these brute force short, cut solutions are forcing more and more users to have to upgrade hardware just for basic function
or be abandoned ,and that comes at a cost.
As far as I am aware this is imposed by the fact that Iray doesn't support curves.
The hair shader does in fact support things like this.
I didn't know Blender could do that. That alpha to strand based transform was just what I was wanting.
I've felt Girabaldi examples have always looked better than LAMH examples. I never used Girabaldi because the registration process kept failing. That limitation is gone.
No...... it does not.
After all curves/splines are typically a VXF used in animation.
IRay Appears targeted to Architecture and product visualization.
It seems not designed to be a character or VFX/animation render engine based on the official promotional galleries:
https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-for-maya/gallery.php
https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-for-rhino/gallery.php
https://www.irayplugins.com/iray-for-3ds-max/gallery.php
Many Iclone users were made painfully aware of this when RL implemented IRay Iclone
Where it does not support Iclone's animated particle effects.
https://vimeo.com/140151898
Now if there was a way to import guide curves into DAZ SBH that might be something. I've asked twice and not gotten an answer on if it is currently technically possible or not.
Was it possible in Garibaldi Express? If not, it may take longer for Daz to develop than if they "only" have to rework the code. Daz tends to play things close to the vest, so if they are working on something like this, they may not want to say anything until they know they can make it happen. (And no, I do not have any insider information. I'm as a big a mushroom as anyone else here! lol)
FBX supports splines/curves ; it's one way to transfer across 3D applications
But DS FBX support is quite limited...
Also, you would need a tool or some way to convert the splines back to the native hair system
Being able import splines&curves ,from another, application
Seems not the issue here as Daz studio 4.11 already supports curves with the new hair system.
The "issue" is that IRay can only render polygon based geometry
unlike other hair systems that apply engine native shaders to the curves as Render/post effect.
BTW way C4D can "stroke" its hair curves with geometry
essentially creating "fibermesh" hair however there is no
logical reason to do so within C4D as the splines are much
less resource intensive for animation.
In Blender you can use any geometry tool to design your hair then convert it to particle hair. I suppose the same can be done in Maya.
Definitely, I suddenly started buying V4 hairs
Mayas Xgen hair can also and will have Dynamics for draping &animation as well
The fact that the PAs liked to do cartoony promo art is not the point, and the fact that you personally don't need anything like it, is not the point either.
The point is, it has *braids*, a type of hair that some of us have a use for, and which is difficult to pull off with strand based hair. As the example Padrone found shows, either you're faking the braids with hair twists in strand hair, or you're faking the whole hair, braids and all, with transmapped, interwoven ribbons in conventionally modelled hair.
I am in favor of strand-based hair as a concept, and look forward to seeing where it will go in Daz Studio. But it's just not quite 100% there, in any software. IMHO.
Bravo, I am impressed.
Well since dForce Eddie Hair dumps me to CPU before it will render I will probably be very wary of buying more strand-based dforce hair until I see if the next beta fixes that. And if it doesn't, I'll have to completely love and not have anything similar already, before buying more.
And I'm waiting for RSSY M4 Hair convert