dForce Hair discussion, Do you like it or not? I don't
jukingeo
Posts: 711
Hello All,
Since dForce hair has been out for a while now, I am going to say that I have not been warming up to it. Something about it's look that I can't put my finger on I just don't like, add to the fact that it is harder to set it up and getting it to look good, I find that I am avoiding dForce hair purchases as it really just slows me down. Perhaps it is still too new? Or is it that the regular hair styles just look better? Please let me know what you think about it. Also if you have ideas for working with it faster and getting better results, by all means chime in!
Thank you,
Geo
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Comments
I do like some transmap hair products, that are dforce ready. I am not a big fan of dforce strand hair, yet. The "yet"is, because it is an early development and this hair system has potential to become better. Right now, every strand hair I've seen in promos, renders or purchased myself just look like some kind of cotton candy hair.
As I said, there is potential and I am happy to wait for the good stuff.
I can see the potential of dForce hair, as well as strnd-based hair. However, they are not quiet really there yet for me. Or rather, they are good in certain, limited areas. Needs greater stability when dealing with hair not pretty much falling straiht down, but with head/neck at 'strange' angles. Needs to be affacted by wind nodes in a consistent fashion. Needs to be able to cope with morphs that could produce poke-thru (such as elf ears) without crashing. Needs to handle motion in animations without leaving a 'trail' of hair floating in the air behind the figure.
I use strand-based hair almost exclusively.
Daz's traditional hair outside of a few poses very quickly looks 'off'. It does take work with the strand-based hair, and practice, but I'm improving. It has far more possibilities and if nothing else, poses don't kill the believability.
I like some of the SBH hair products in the store since they are a bit lighter in resources that the earlier dforce based hair product and simulate well in my experience. I rarely use non dforce hair any more these days unless it's a quality looking short hair that doesn't need to be dforced. The amount of time it takes to work with a product and to simulate doesn't factor into my workflow since i want quality looks and that can take time.
i still use Lindays doforce hair products almost exclusively for about 90% of my images since i know how to work with them, have presets saved and they look amazing.
I am surprised there are not more SBH dforce hair products in the store yet. the tech has been out awhile and the PAs have all the tools, make it happen!
I love it and have pretty much stopped buying anything non-dForce Hair, with a few exceptions: really REALLY high quality fibermesh, and more structured hair that's incredibly hard to do with dForce Hair (like braids).
I like Force hair a lot, I use both dForce and traditional comforming hair.
It's pretty good. Nice to see some shorter dForce hair come along, too. I use all types of hair, though. Transmapped, fibremesh, dForce, transmapped with dForce, angelhair pasta, whatever.
Yep, that is about my experience, too. Especially not really seeing the hair before the render makes it weird to use for me.
Yep, those dForce ready hair products work quite well for me, too.
And I share the feeling of strand hair - often - having a unreal or rather uncanny valley kinda look.
dforce hair is awesome!
My dforce SBH hairs do double duty. They are built to have morphs like the standard 3d hair models and they simulate.
Im gonna disagree with you on almost all of this. It's there. The problem is that the knowledge of how to use this tech is not there; particularly with customers.
Everything you mentioned can be fixed by adjusting a surface or simulation setting. I will take all of this information to my SBH thread to answer all of it as I don't want to hijack this thread.
link to thread? (I know I've seen it around but can't remember where)
I've not used dforce hair (or clothing) much but that's only down to lack of time to learn how to use it properly - There are some great hairs available for it and I'll get round to using it when I need it. Since I focus a lot on environment and prop creation, the figures+clothes tend to get left on 'simple' setting.
It's too resource heavy for me. I tried out that Christmas freebie tail on one g8 figure, and it was the only thing I could render. Two figures was completely impossible. It's too bad, because it does look very nice. But alas, this tech is just too much for my system.
I, potentially, agree with you. Sadly a lot of what the parameters are is arcane! Your thread is going to be very useful!
My only beef with SBH is that you can't see it until it renders...unless you turn up the line tessellation, which of course results in nuking your system usage. But to put a scene together if it's anything more than just a model portrait standing there, you kind of need to see the hair...so for me it's a dance of turning the line tessellation up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down...
The earlier styles did look...not very nice...but the more recent ones coming out do. And the animals that have been coming out with it, especially AM's, look way better than even LAMH.
I've got about five or six now and I haven't really liked any of them. They add too much prep time to my renders (especially as I tend to do stuff in a series of images) and the extra work to just preview them is not worth the hassle. I'm happy with hair that has some good solid bones in them and will happily wait out dForce hair improving.
But I do like dForce clothes and there are some dForce 'fabric' hair that I've picked up that work really well. I wish we saw that option more often, since all I want is the hair to settle nicely on their shoulders.
That's not a fault of the products / software. You make a choice where to allocate resouces and time. People seem to constantly underestimate the hardware needed to bring their grand visions to life. 3D rendering is not for the faint of hardware.
Yeh, pretty much.
I've found PhilW's hairs to be excellent; sim-wise they are fast, and the look is likewise impressive.
I also like Oso3D's hair, which also simulates very quickly.
And that's great. Which is why I said "It's too much for my system". Not everyone's systems. Just mine. And that's too bad. For me. I'm not rich, I can't afford to upgrade graphics cards every year. If others can that's ok and I hope they enjoy it. I will do what I can what what I have. I do not expect the tech to stop evolving just because I'm not flush with discretionary funds.
The OP's question was do you like dforce hair or not. I personally don't. But that's not stopping anyone else from liking it. Or using it. it's just my opinion.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My system is no slouch and it still struggles with dForce hair. I say that as Daz is just re-loading a scene after crashing while trying to preview the new soft curls hair on a G8 figure. The scene is heavy to begin with (dForce clothing and SBH I've added myself on a couple items), and adding that dForce SBH on top was enough for everybody involved to say NOPE. As I said above, it's a delicate dance of turning the line tessellation up and down and up and down an up and down...but you *need* to be able to see what the hair looks like before committing.
I haven't been super crazy about it. Most of it looks like chopped off yarn, but certain PAs like April YSH and Chevybabe have managed to make it look good.
Laurie
I like the result but the cost is way too high to make it worthwhile. By cost I don't mean dollars but time. It's not just the time of one simiulation, which is already a lot for anyone not having a very expensive GPU, but that it is difficult to picture how the hair will simulate after adjusting poses. So it means another time consomung simulation with unknown or no payoff. This is probably not a problem for pros who are very skilled in posing and scene setting but for hobbiest it is extremely motivation sagging.
I'm collecting the occasional piece and biding my time before I go all in. I find it more useful to get a conforming hair and adding dForce to the bits I need to use gravity.
Also, what hair looks good and what hair doesn't look good is very subjective. I think some hairs look better than others but this us entirely subjective.
I used to love strand based hair and after a while I grew frustrated but it has a heavy impact on me because it encouraged me to start learning 3D modeling and hair creation in other apps. And the skills I acquired with the strand based editor are transferable so I think the strand based editor is some good tool to learn hair guide modeling.
One thing I love about mesh hair, strand based hair, dforce hair: they aren't heavy on textures - I usually don't render with any textures at all - they work well with the dual lobe hair shader that was developed for them. Also, if you have a card that supports raytracing these work well and gives you a fine speed boost. Transmapped hair renders quite slowly for me ...
@Asari I agree with all of your points. Especially that long hairs really can look at lot more convincing now, allthough master hair builders like AprilSYH and OOT make some incredible conforming hairs.
I use mostly transmapped hair that is really detailed, like from the 'master hair makers' mentioned above, AprilSYH and Out of Touch and also some others. Many have great morphs set up which let me simulate quite an array of movements and styles I think, and I can always add more myself by using DFormers.
I haven't bought any dForce hair yet and that is mainly because somehow, nobody seems to be getting the hairline right. There's always something extremely off about it, like with those dForce curls that were a new item in March Madness a few weeks ago. The hair itself is alright-looking I think, but the hairline is so, like, ill-defined or messed-up or something, it looks like a badly made wig to me. There are some dForce hairs I would actually like very much to buy, like the Dutch Double Braids (https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-double-dutch-braids-for-genesis-8-and-genesis-3-females), but again, there seems to be something very wrong with the hairline. It looks like it was mirrored right in the center, and rather badly at that. Just not natural I think. It's a pity because the hair style is beautiful and all the rest looking really nice and realistic, but how can I use it if I can never show my character's face above, say, eye-brow height with it ...
For me, there are two different forms of dForce Hair.
Fur and hair.
In terms of fur, it is very good and offers more control with the way the fur looks/behaves. You can also affect it more with some understanding of the maps used.
In terms of hair, it is a mixed bag. Sometimes it looks good, sometimes not.
It just generally looks a bit like hair made of beard hair (or something more rude), and usually has some weird jaggedly cutting or mishapeness going on (or just rather boring styles). Other than better posability (which is debatable as transmapped hair using Dforce works basically the same), it doesn't tend to look a whole lot more "realistic" and sometimes due to the previous issues less so (renders seem prone to aliasing too, which isn't a good look).
Maybe if it was able to be experimented with by more people it would have improved a bunch more in the same time, rather than hobbled to all but the special guest club.
I understand that people are upset about the dforce part but everyone has access to the hair creation tools.