Hyenas and Look At My Hair (LAMH)?

Elemental Flame

I purchased the "Hyena for DAZ Big Cat 2" pack (https://www.daz3d.com/hyena) and I am able to add the actors but when I try to bring one in that has the LAMH feature for the mane and tail I get a green looking mesh where the mane and tail would be but no hair when I render. The pack says that it comes with full fur presets which I imagine these are... so how do I get hair into this preset? 

Any help is appreciated!

MelanieL

First, which renderer are you using: Iray or 3Delight? The LAMH hair only works out-of-the-box with 3Delight (except for animals by Alessandro_AM, which have Iray versions).

Second, do you have either the full LAMH plugin or the Free LAMH player installed? The hair won't work at all without one of those plugins.

(Seeing the green guide hairs in the viewport is normal, so it sounds like you have the right model loaded at least.)

Elemental Flame

I was using lray -- but after reading your comment I found how to switch my rendering to 3Delight. When I rendered the hyena I did see the hair for the mane and tail but the entire thing is pitch black. I've tried fiddling with a bunch of rendering options under 3Delight but nothing seems to make this more than a silhouette.

I am showing LAMH Player for DAZ Studio 4.5+ (Win 64-bit) installed in the install manager.

Elemental Flame

Nevermind, with lray I always turn off the headlamp and it seems I need that in 3Delight. I see a hyena now. Thank you!!!

I'm a bit partial to lray since it's what I've been using. Is there a way to make the few LAMH items I have that aren't Alessandro_AM's work with lray? You said it doesn't work out of the box.

MelanieL

You can export the hair as an object file then delete the LAMH hair item, load the object file you saved, apply an Iray shader to the hair and render it then. It's not something I do myself, so I'm a little hazy on the details, but there's bound to be details somewhere in the forum - one I found was this one: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/224551/how-do-i-convert-a-lamh-shader-to-work-with-iray and there are likely to be details in the Official Thread too, but it's many pages long so finding the info may take a lot of reading: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/14818/look-at-my-hair-lamh-official-thread-update-1-6-0-1-released/p1

If you buy the full LAMH (paid-for) plugin, you can convert the hair to Fibre Hair, which will render in Iray, but that obviously costs you! There is information about this here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/66187/fyi-lamh-fiberhair-works-in-iray-edit-and-luxus#latest

MelanieL

Oh and I just found this video by the creator of LAMH about exporting to obj file: http://youtube.com/watch?v=UYdpH6JeSyg#t=

Elemental Flame

Melanie, you have been very helpful, thank you! I will add the full version of LAMH to my wishlist.. there's quite a few of Alessandro's animals already in there and I am waiting for a sale. :)

In the post you referenced, the "Load in Studio" box is something only available with the paid version and that's what I'd need and everything should work swimmingly in lray?

MelanieL

sreber said:

Melanie, you have been very helpful, thank you! I will add the full version of LAMH to my wishlist.. there's quite a few of Alessandro's animals already in there and I am waiting for a sale. :)

In the post you referenced, the "Load in Studio" box is something only available with the paid version and that's what I'd need and everything should work swimmingly in lray?

I think so - again I've not really done it myself as almost all my furry animals are Alessandro_AMs and come with Iray presets via Catalyzer. Incidentally, if you plan to buy many of his own products and use them in Iray then you will proabably want his Catalyzer product too.

IMO the full LAMH product with it's high-ish price is rather less useful today than it used to be, since DS4.11 now has it's own the inbuilt strand-based hair creator which works natively in Iray. But if you really want to use other vendor's LAMH products (like the Hyena or any of RawArts older creatures) in Iray and find the obj export too much effort (or too resource-heavy on your PC) then maybe it's worth it to you.

Edit: to clarify personal opinion - I'm not criticising the product which I do own and have been known to use from time to time, though not very competently!