Iray Shaders for Strand-Based Hair! From MMX…
L'Adair
Posts: 9,479
Another SBH product hit the store today, this time MMX Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shader Toolkit for Iray. I suspect this set uses the "4-Layer Uber PBR MDL" shader settings that were part of the Default Resources for DAZ Studio 4.9+ update a couple days back, because the promo images show it also works with the "older" modeled, trans-mapped hair. (I'm just guessing!) Update: I was wrong. The "4-Layer Uber PBR MDL" is nothing like the Blended Dual Lobe Hair shaders!
Regardless, this is a massive resource for giving any fiber hair, your SB Hair and purchased dForce Hair a natural look, even with unnatural color. (I think we've all seen people with purple or green hair, if not IRL, at least on TV or in the movies.) That it can also work with trans-mapped hair is a bonus, imo, but I'd buy it even if it didn't!
Thank you, @Mattymanx!
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You're welcome.
The Blended Dual Lobe Hair shader is the shader used on strand based hair by default in Daz Studio and also on the dForce Strand based hairs. All the promos except the last two use Strand based hair except for this one - https://www.daz3d.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/m/mmx-blended-dual-lobe-hair-shader-toolkit-for-iray-30-daz3d.jpg
Using it on modeled hair is a hit or miss but I have had good results with the Classic Long hair with dForce. All my renders with it since June use the BDL Hair shader.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d7/33/6c/d7336ce6416353b11f09dfd6fa3866b0.jpg
I have been experimenting with color maps myself but my strands always look uncontrolled like someone sprayed color randomly on hair instead of blended color strands.
I'm rendering an image now where the character is wearing a fiber hair, Retro Hero from RedzStudio, and your BDL Hair shaders work fantastic on it. I think all of Redz' fiber hairs use three material zones, which work really nice with your shaders because it's easy to mix and match.
I'm not sure, but I think you can, if you use images. Maybe @Mattymanx will stop back in and answer your question definitively.
THe easiest way would be to start with one of the full color presets and then as mentioned already, add a grey scale map. Each of the promos that use an image map have it in all 6 color channels so it shows you the full effect. You can load the images into just one or several of the color channels to get a different effect. Try adding a grey scale map to the rot channels first and play with the Root to Tip Bias & Gain settings to control how strong the effects will be from the scape outward.
Fiber hair will work better then modeled hair but you still one get the full effect that you will with SBH. But it does look much better with the BDL hair shader on it.
You're welcome.
Cause its the PA sale, stuff released earlier in the month normally go back on sale on a week end, or at least they did in times past. Either way, at the end of hte month there will be a catch up so you have multiple opertunities to grab it.
Another way to do colors like that would be to start with a dark color in the root transmission and color, use the individual color presets, and then a lighter color in the tips. Add one grey scale map to the root and a different one to the tip. They can be tiled seperately to create different variations in the look and color.
I know. The first thing I did after installing was to pull up an old scene file with my first attempt using SBH. It looked amazing and I had fun changing it from one color to another. But I'm not, yet, proficient with the SBH Editor, so I don't have a lot of "home-made" hair. And I also haven't invested in many dForce Hair products.
So I wanted to see how much these shaders improve fiber and trans-mapped hair. I've got most of the fiber hair products from RedzStudio, (even those found elsewheRe,) so verifying this works really well with her hair makes this an investment in my current runtime, as well as for any SBH or dForce Hair I create/acquire in the future… Regardless of how it works with single-material-zone fiber hair. (Or how inconsistent the results are on the trans-mapped hair, which I've yet to test.)
I'll be posting some images as I have them.
I hope other people will feel free to post their result images in here, too.
Before you start poking at modeled hairs, see the last paragraph on this promo if you have not already - https://www.daz3d.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/m/mmx-blended-dual-lobe-hair-shader-toolkit-for-iray-38-daz3d.jpg
I also found that a bump map strength value of 2-5 was also useful with modeled hair.
Okay. Here's an outdoor portrait that does a decent job of showing off what I did using three of the full-color presets on the Retro Hero hair from Redz:
Attitude
I've got the camera set up for a closeup. I'm going to "get creative" with the shaders, and I'll render any combinations I think turned out particularly well. I'll post those here in a day or so.
That looks very good!
I don't know how I missed this product. It's going in my cart right now!
Thank you, Mattymanx.
You're welcome, @Leonides02
Thank you very much!
You're welcome!
Was an insta-buy for me too. I'm a sucker for shaders and having more control over the colors for strand based hair is an awesome thing. I'm also going to pickup Sloshwerk's product because I love having options. :)
LOL Me, too!
I've got a couple more images for this thread…
This is Linday's Curly Hair. It uses four separate layers for short hair close to the head, and four separate layers for the length. Unlike Redz' fiber hair, these material zones stack from the bottom up, rather than intermingling. (Observation, not critique.) So it made more sense to use the same shader settings on all the layers. It seems like the transmapped hair here was more responsive to the separate highlights, though I really need to use this on a lot more hair to say anything definitive. Other than, this is looking really good.
These two images use the same shader settings, only the lighting is different.
Images link to the full-size images, which are 2k by 2.6k. There is no postwork on the hair; This is how it looked when it rendered. The second image rendered overnight, as the highlight were pixelated at a lower sample rate. In general, this long hair took much longer to render than the fiber hair, but I don't know if it's the hair or the shaders. With the second image, on the right, there are bright spots on the hair I would normally postwork. Not much, but enough to add a bit of texture.
With the "Root-to-Tip" setting can you make realistic dark roots for light-coloured hair?
How does it do with fur? Is there a 'generic' setting on top of which fur patterns can be placed?
Absolutely. And if you wanted to simulate dyed hair that's fading, you can adjust how far the root color extends up the hair.
In theory is should work fine since Studio / the shader don't know the difference between hair and fur. However the fur patterns make take some work to get them to work properly. Since Matty made this shader with the idea of using maps to control some of the colors, you should be able to get it to work. I have some recent dForce furry critters that I'm itching to try it on. :) Will post some of my results when I get the time.
Any idea how it compares to the other new product from SloshWerks https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-extreme-hair-texture-blending-for-iray-and-dforce-hair? It also says it works on SBH and fibre-based hair. I'm a little confused about its blend modes, as there are quite a few I couldn't distinguish at all, and others look different mostly because the colours involved are different, and the blending looks pretty similar. The images are too small to allow closer evaluation.
I have both; so I'll try to do some comparison work this weekend to show them. Since they are both based on the Daz Dual Lobe shader that is used for SBH, I have a feeling they are similar with mostly the included texture files, blending masks, and included presets being the main difference.
Okay, one last image before I start comparing the two products.
This is the Sanjay Hair fit-to Sienna. This hair has four material zones, two short bangs sections in the front, one thin, wispy section overall, and one thick section. I used a dark blonde on the main section of hair, then a lighter blonde on the other three material zones.
This image links to the full-size image, which is 2k by 2.6k.
I've started running some comparison renders using PhilW's Femme Fatale hair. I picked it because it has the twists and curls that will show how the highlights and such work. But there's a lot of geometry there so even though the scene fits in my GPU, it's taking a while to render. I'm hitting the default 2 hour limit and only about 50% converged. I plan to put all of my experiments on my blog, but will also add to the knowledge here that I know L'Adair is working on too.
One thing that tripped me up at first.
Phil used maps in his root and tip channels. Matty's Full Color Presets don't have any map settings in them (which totally makes sense given that there are seperate settings for managing the maps!) But I couldn't figure out why my blonde presets looked like just slightly lighter versions of Phil's light brunette that I'd used as a "baseline" render. Until I found the "Full Color Remove Maps" preset at the bottom of MMX's Map settings. Now things are looking better. :)
I love these shaders even on non-strand hair! Great work, Matty. :)
I tried using them on some of furs.
Here is one result;
Did a quick test with Sloshwerks shaders. I'll do a better comparison later, when I have the renders to back it up, but I just wanted to mention the two systems work very differently from each other. I know Matty's shaders will work on SBH as they use the settings developed for it, but I haven't tried Slosh's on SBH yet, so I can only guess that they work. First impression: Both sets have pros and cons, but I'm sure I'll get a lot of use out of both.
@Eboshijaana, Where did you find SBH for Daz Dog 8? (Or is that something else on a different dog?)