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Oso has two creatures for dazdog that use dforce hair.
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-oso-lechuza-for-daz-dog-8
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-oso-pooka-for-daz-dog-8
The pooka is better, because it has fur on its face.
LOL…! Of course he does. I should have known it was from Will, (Oso3D).
As I've mentioned before, a big part of the allure of MMX's shaders is that they will also work on fiber hair and trans-mapped hair, even though how well is going to be dependent on many variables. If these shaders only worked on SBH/dForce Hair, they wouldn't be particularly useful to me in the short run.
I've tested this with both fiber hair and newer trans-mapped hair and was happy with the results. I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of trans-mapped hairs from different generations, specifically because how trans-mapped hair is created now is much different than how it was created before Iray was added to Daz Studio.
For this comparison I've chosen AprilYSH's Julius Hair for Genesis 2 Female, (though it's the same hair for both genders and multiple generations,) and 3DCelebrity's Layered Fringe Hair for G3/G8 Females. The models are the base females for G2, (left) and G8 (right) and both are wearing a draped poncho for modesty, even though the gals and their poncho are using a clay render shader.) The images are as rendered, with no postwork; Both figures are in the scene, each an equal distance on the X axis from world center.
Image 01:
This image highlights the different construction of the mesh. Notice how Julius Hair uses thick tubes to emulate the strands, while the Layered Fringe Hair uses very thin strips of mesh, and a lot more of them. (No trans-maps in this image.)
Image 02
This image adds the trans-maps back in. You can see how "thin" the Julius Hair is with the shoulder line visible. The Layered Fringe Hair still looks nice and thick, obscuring the line of the shoulders and the poncho underneath.
Image 03
These are included materials for the respective hair. The Julius Hair is pre-Iray, so the material are converted to Iray Uber Base, either manually as I have done here, or automatically when rendering. If you convert them manually, you can go in and tweak the settings for a less glossy look. I left these as applied.
Image 04
Here I've selected all but the scalp material zones for both hairs and applied a blonde full-color shader. I then tweaked the Highlights. Because I applied these at the same time, the shaders are identical between the two. I did have to modify the scalp for the Julius Hair, using a gray material that I added a "blonde" color to in the Base Color setting. The scalp for the Layered Fringe Hair didn't show, and I made no changes to it.
The Julius Hair actually holds up well with Iray, but it's thin. One of the tricks we used in the early days of Iray was to duplicate the hair, using two copies to make the hair look fuller. I've done that with Julius Hair, using several of the many morphs that come with it to make the copy slightly different than the original.
One of the cool aspects of the Blended Dual Lobe Hair shader system is the ability to make the root of the hair one color and the tip of the hair another. The MMX shaders apply that system to any hair, but the results on fiber hair and trans-mapped hair vary a lot. Using the same hairs and models, I applied the shaders to both hair objects attempting to get that blended color effect.
Image 05
I think I should have used a lighter Root color, however, I think you can see the Julius Hair has purple ends. The Layered Fringe Hair did not apply the Tip color as consistently as Julius Hair did. I kept shaders on both hairs the same, but to get the purple on the ends of the Julius Hair, I had to make the Root colors purple and the Tip colors Brunette. And with the lighter background, I think you can also see better how thin the older Julius Hair is.
Image 06
This is the smae setup, but this time I used ColorwerksX on the hairs. Unlike the MMX shaders, this product uses a custom shader. It supplies masks to apply to the second color to control wheree the blended color is applied. Again, the mesh from these two hairs appear to have opposite "Root" and "Tip" areas. This shader has a Swap colors option, so if the hair looks like the Layer Hair here, you can turn that option on, and the hair should then look like it does on the Julius Hair here. I don't know if it's a result of my not knowing the shaders well yet, or if it's a limitation of the product, but I notice the top of the Julius Hair appears to be blended with gray. That may also be true of the Layered Fringe Hair, but harder to see.
Image 07
Of course, it's important to show the two shader systems side-by-side, using SBH/dForce Hair. For that, I pulled up the included Mohawk SBH from the dForce Starter Essentials.
The shaders on the left are from MMX Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shader Toolkit for Iray and the shaders on the right are from ColorWerks Extreme: Hair Texture Blending for Iray and dForce Hair. I limited myself to only using presets from these products. The purples from the MMX product are more pink than those in the ColorWerks product. It would have been fairly easy to tweak the purple colors in the Surfaces Editor to match the colors.
The MMX product includes a number of maps that can be used to modify the hair color, but I didn't use them for this comparison. On the other hand, the ColorWerks product controls the colors by using image maps.
Conclusions:
I like both products for different reasons. I know using the MMX shaders, I'll become adept at the Blended Dual Lobe Hair shaders that Daz provides for the SBH/dForce Hair. That's important to me, as I plan on making my own hair when I can't find something to fit my vision of a scene. ColorWerksX is a bit easier to use, but bypasses the Blended Dual Lobe Hair shaders. (And I didn't test it on Fiber hair. Oops.)
As I created this thread for the MMX Shaders, I won't be posting anything further on the ColorWerks product here. I'll just finish this comparison post saying: I'm really glad I bought both. Neither one will languish on my hard drive.
Thank you very much for the presentation.
Blending has been around for a while and I've not used it often. The previous products are adequate for my needs there, as I don't do a lot of parti-coloured hair. What I like is characters who dye their hair like regular people do, and like my avatar. That's to say, that, as it starts to grow out, there are darker roots that show. Like this:
I know how to accomplish this, but am looking for a way to get a similar result with a single hair set because VRAM, rather than what it looks like when colour has been growing out for months.
For me, that particular look has been a real pain to achieve in the past, usually requiring I make changes to the texture maps in Photoshop to make the roots darker. SBH/dForce Hair with the 4-Layer shaders can do that. I did something very similar when I was first testing the SB hair while it was still in beta. (You can see the results here.)
That side-shaved hair turned out pretty nice. And yeah, there's always reworking the textures, but one already has that capability, and it's not something I'd enjoy as much as putting scene elements together.
As it stands, I think I'll give both these products a pass for now. I can sort out most hair with the assets I already have, like some Outoftouch products. Once someone shows me a product that can bring hair colouring a bit more down to earth, I'll be all over it, though.
@L'Adair Please explain what you mean about a 4 layer shader created for SBH hair. The shader that I see used for SBH hair is the Blended Dual Lobe Hair shader.
@barbult, I thought they were the same thing. (I was wrong. I'll have to revise my posts.)
There was a recent update to the Default Resources for DAZ Studio 4.9+ and checking the files, I found the only difference was the addition of support for a "4-Layer Uber PBR MDL".
Shortly after the update, MMX's shaders were released. And I made an assumption. Whoops. I should know better than to assume things.
Anyway, I just created a sphere and applied the new Uber base… and it's quite different than the blended hair.
Sorry for the late replay. Thank you Johnny for answering.
To addon to his answer, this promo was done with sepereate root and tip colors - 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- and the Root to Tip function to adjust how much of each.
This promo demonstrates the Root-to-Tip functions and how they work - https://www.daz3d.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/m/mmx-blended-dual-lobe-hair-shader-toolkit-for-iray-37-daz3d.jpg - with strand based hair.
The thing to keep in mind with strand based hair and dForce SBH is that the surface it was painted onto will greatly influence how an image map appears on it. So if you wanted a long haired dog, like a german shapard, and the dog model already has a good quality german shapeard texture map, then you should be able to get away with using that as the texture on the hair shader. How it will appear will depend partly on how thick the SBH is on the dog. If you want to use a custom image map, then how the dog model is UV mapped will affect how the image map appears.
Thank you @L'Adair for starting the thread and posting comparrisons. I honestly wish I could have had double the promos and was able to properly demonstrate just what everything does. The Blended dual lobe hair shader that Daz made is an absolute amazing masterpiece!
And thank you to everyone here who has bought this.
[ Edit: Corrected a false assumption about how Slosh's shader works. Information is still valid for Matty's shader kit though. ]
I had to pause my experiments over the weekend because other things came up, but I wanted to make a general point about trying to use shaders intended for Strand Based Hair for our more standard transmapped hair products.
Back in 2014, I was experimenting with how to adapt the work done at Stanford University by Stephen Marschner (Light Scattering from Human Hair Fibers) to work on transmapped hair. His geometric and mathematical models were the basis for innovations by companies like Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. The struggle, I found, was that those models were based on the actual geometry of a human hair (Marshner even accounted for hair that isn't a perfect cylinder).
However, transmapped hair isn't like that. It's (typically) flat ribbons that are meant to approximate hair. So the major hurdle I ran into was how to take a flat surface and get the shader to believe it was actually rendering a strand of hair. Even bump mapping doesn't really help because it's still simulating geometry; so you won't get some of the detailed self-shading and transmission that you get when hair strands are stacked on top of each other.
So, expecting a product like Matty's to be able to transform transmapped hair to look as good as strand based ones isn't a realistic measuring stick. This is why we have so many options when it comes to shading for transmapped hair. In addition to OutOfTouch's custom hair shader, I have several general shaders as I've found depending on the hair and the lighting, one or the other might produce a better result.
Yes, I have all of these.
Yes, I know it's a lot.
Yes, I know I have a "problem".
Judging by that avatar, you're compensating for the same issue I have lol.
Anyway, @Mattymanx I saw the promos. We're talking about different things, though. You're defining "root" as whatever's closer to the scalp than the tip is. I'm just talking about the quarter inch or less closest to the scalp that people mean when they talk about "touching up your roots" when you have dyed hair IRL. If you look at the image I posted in this thread, you can see what I'm referring to.
I decided to be fair to Slosh, I should start my own thread to show my tests since I was trying to give both shader packages a rundown.
MMX and Sloshwerks SBH Shaders
Here are some tests done with shader options from MMX pack.
Yeh, JonnyRay, I have to point out CWX is not based on the dual lobe shader as MMX is... it was designed primarily for transmapped hair, but happens to work well on strand based as well, so most of what you are trying to say about my shader struggling to work on transmapped hair is inaccurate. If it struggled anywhere, it would be on SBH, not on transmapped. But, I don't think it struggles on either type of hair. PS, sorry Matty. I tried to stay out of thsi thread, lol
As an aside, if you have my Thicket for G8M, you can apply the textures to other dynamic hair to get some weird funky results.
Just be sure to set Render Tessellation to 3 (some hairs will be 1 or 2), and drop the hair density a bunch (1-2 is usually a good starting point)
Yeah, I corrected that here and in my other comparison thread as well. I just felt badly that Matty's product was being judged by it's usefulness for transmapped hair, which wasn't really fair given the underlying technological, geometrical, and mathematical struggles trying to get that to work.
On my "to do" list is to try Matty's shader to create some funky looking Draco Furos too. :)
Its ok, its not my thread.
Thanks for clairifying that CWX is not BDLHS but only borrows from it. Even I did not know that.
Ouch. That wasn't my intent at all!
The point of showing how well the Blended Dual Lobe Hair shaders work on Fiber hair, and to some extent on trans-mapped hair, was to showcase the versatility of the product. dForce Hair releases have yet to overtake those of fiber hair and trans-mapped hair, and I've even read some posts where folks say they won't buy dForce Hair because their computers aren't powerful enough for dForce. I think a lot of people will pass on these shaders because they think the shaders only work on SBH and dForce Hair.
And that would be their loss.
Hence, this thread…
Okay, I stole this quote from JonnyRay's thread because I wanted to comment on it, without taking his thread in another direction. (These two threads complement each other rather well, I think. Anyway…) This is what I wanted to respond to:
This is a very good point. Daz put a lot of time and effort into creating the Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shaders for their Daz Studio exclusive SBH and dForce Hair. It is extremely powerful. Which also means it is very complex, and that means it can be very intimidating until one actually knows how to use all those settings. (At least it is for me and, I suspect, a large percentage of DS users.) Until we learn the ins and outs of the BDLHS, we are pretty much limited to the hair color presets provided for dForce Hair products we purchase from the store. With so many settings to work with, there is quite the learning curve, (imo.)
Matty's product makes using the BDLHS a whole lot easier. He's provided us with more than 100 full-color presets ranging from realistic browns and blondes to fantasy colors pink and purple. He's provided color maps to create fantastical color blends. And he's provided presets to control virtually all the settings of the BDLHS so we can tweak to our hearts content, without needing to locate this or that setting in the Surfaces > Editor. The promo images for this product alone create an image tutorial of the BDLHS, but combine that information with the highly organized presets, and this product has the potential to teach you how to use all the settings, but at your own pace. LIke a full-featured digital camera, you never have to go beyond the fully automatic if you don't want to, but you have the option at any time to switch over and use the semi-automatic, or delve into tweaking all the settings. And the more you play with the individual presets of this product, the more you'll learn the BDLHS, without really trying.
I think the easiest way to compare the MMX and CWX products is this:
The MMX Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shader Toolkit for Iray was developed for use with the Strand-Based Hair and dForce Hair, but it can also work on Fiber Hair and—depending on the hair construction—Trans-Mapped Hair. The ColorWerks Extreme: Hair Texture Blending for Iray and dForce Hair was developed for use with Trans-Mapped Hair, but it can also work on Fiber Hair, as well as the Strand-Based Hair and dForce Hair.
I've finally succeeded in building a multi-layered hair model consisting of 5 different individual pieces of SBH hairs and I'm particularly excited to see what happens if you apply different color maps to different pieces of the hair. Will post pictures later.
Just playing around with the color maps ... haven't figured it out yet and still many different options to try, but good initial result. Now after I've installed the package I understand why the promo pictures include so much information. This is a complex product with many different options and not every option is self-explanatory. Thank you Mattymanx!
My first result, with greyscale maps in the root color. This hair is separated into 5 different pieces and I've set different greyscale maps for each parts, and also different colors. I'll test with more extreme results, e.g. more contrast between root and tip color.
This is your own SB Hair? Wow. Well done!
And yes, this product has a lot of presets. It's complex because the Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shader is complex. There's definitely a learning curve to using Mattymanx's product, but it's still a lot easier, (and far bettter explained!) than using the shaders directly.
I hope you'll share more of your results using the MMX product on your SBH creations.
That looks really good. The map use blends so well. I would not have guessed they were used.
Doing hair in groups like that was a suggestion in the beginning with Garibaldi Hair.
Something I noticed, not sure if I shared or not is that with SBH, if you set the surface angle to 180, Iray reports lower geometry use for Vram. Not sure why that is but if it saves are vram then Im game.
In this example I did not choose extreme color combinations so the effect is very subtle. I plan to post some pictures where the color blending is more visible but spent the weekend learning thin walled in shaders ... but I will play with the options. Although I don't use many of the colors I also appreciate it immensely that this product also teaches you what some of the features of the dual lobe shader does.
You're welcome!
That is a great looking SBH. One of the best I've seen.
@Leonides02: Thank you!
Improved my hair model and tried out one of MMX color maps. Very cool effects if you have different hair pieces.