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I‘m just thinking with the discounts on some of the dforce hairs right now, I might actually try one of them, maybe the hairline problem can be fixed somehow or is not that bad really. They do look very pretty and realistic in general.
But without that it's basically limited to body hair, fur and short hair due to practicality. Sure I can use it for eyebrows and stuff, but I wouldn't bother with it for proper hair, It's too limited. For medium long styles, i'd just use transmapped Dforce hair instead.
It's not like no one buys characters, poses, clothing, HDRIs, props, environments and everything else that everyone can make themselves, so it doesn't really make as much sense as they think it does. Dforce clothing was adopted and improved by a large number of people and basically became the new standard. Dforce hair didn't.
I don't know what Daz's reasoning was with the decision to go about things this way, but I do know that converting long hair is fairly complex. Hairs can go everywhere, simulations can become a giagantic knot, vertices shoot off into outer space for almost no reason. The software can crash a lot, it can lose objects etc. Dforce cloth is no where near as complex imo. I would imagine that some reasoning behind it was to simplify end user experience. You can make the hair with the SBH editor, save it, and with a few tweaks of a comb you can fake a simulation. I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen a lot more people utilizing it. I've made a few longer hairs in it myself.
There is information for the hair here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/392566/released-dforce-soft-curls-commercial#latest
Also more information on my SBH hairs here : https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/380281/chevybabe-s-dforce-sbh-hair-thread#latest
yeah I am not fond of it either
ironically I will buy the DAZ strand based furs even though I have Zbrush and Carrara simply because the PA's are more skilled than me at styling them
but
I don't simulate them!
am annoyed setting tessellation in most to 3 freezes DAZ though for FBX export
if I can export them they are at least rigged but also the issue as to what I can import into
The software is full of things that can break other things easily (save functions/morph loader/transfer utility/etc/etc/etc), but none of those are removed or locked. It would be simple to have the dforce hair settings with "expert users only" and a "this will destroy the earth if you enable it, do you agree to accept full liability yes/no" if that was the only reason.
I know you can fake simulation that way, but it basically negates the entire point of it being Dforce to start with, which is fast, almost effortless simulations. Having to tweak a hair over and over is time consuming, and would be a massive undertaking for animations.
As to why few people use it, you have to weigh it against other options for user hair creation. Transmapped hair often looks better and works with dforce. There are several external strand hair options too. Balanced against the competition, a cut down version without the main selling point is basically just another product that does the same as others (with more/less features). It's only really the cut features that make it any more appealing.
I think it's fair to say that none of us ( except Daz) can say for certain why they put limits on their tools. I can only speculate, based on my own trials and tribulations of creating these products what their reasoning may be. I will stress that SBH is native and free to a free software program.
Combing the hair manually works if you have to adjust for the pose here and there to avoid pokethroughs. But no hair combing tool of all hair creation solutions is developed for moving hair guides leaving guide structure intact.
What I mean is this: the comb tools are made for actually sculpting the hair. Therefore they are made to change the structure of the guides entirely. They are not made for more movement of the hair guides, or for non-invasive changes. This is not an error of the editor or the tool, this is its design. As far as I'm concerned it's the way many if not all hair creation solution is developed.
Now what's entirely annoying and frustrating with this method is: you can't see the rest of your scene in the SBH editor. If you wanna tweak the hair in the SBH editor to fake a collision you have to see where the collision object is. If you wanna tweak the hair for a pose you have to see where e.g the shoulders of your model is in that specific pose. You have to trial and error guess where the area is where you go. This is actually an aspect I wish the SBH performed better, because I have to say, for a free app, the hair creation abilities aren't so bad. True, there are more powerful hair solutions on the market that are more advanced, create far better hair geometry and have easier, more intuitive workflows but most of them aren't free, and they have a steep learning curve. All of them offer hair physics simulation, either their own simulation tools or they use integrated ones. They aren't easy to use, far from it. But even if you do stills and don't want to simulate your hair (because let's be honest - running a correct and good hair simulation can also be a challenge) you can comb your hair by hand and at least see the rest of your scene so you don't have to guess where the collision will be. I think if the SBH editor could do this this would be great.
But really I don't wanna sound overly negative. Nor do I wish to bash SBH or dforce hair, for that matter. I think dforce hair is a good way to move forward regarding posing long hair, and I don't think it shall replace transmapped hair at all. The SBH is a good introduction to hair guides modeling and mesh hair creation because it doesn't have too many tools and a quite straightforward styling tab interface that won't overwhelm you if you have never used any hair creation tool at all before it, and it teaches you valuable basics regarding hair, guides, styling, clumping, and also the dependency between hair geometry and hair shading. All very valuable skills and knowledge should you decide to move forward one day.
As it stands, it's current free version doesn't offer anything over other free solutions, other than a single import. When we consider how the SBH editor is quite crash prone, lacks some of the tools of other editors and the viewport issues, it's one advantage can easily be outweighed.
If it had all it's advantages, it would outcompete the competition and I'm sure loads of people would use it more often, for things other than body hair/grass. But as that's not going to happen, it's only really more useful for people who can use all the stuff to make it more useful.
You'll notice there's not really any active user made SBH threads.
I use Chevybabe's hair because it has morphs like regular hair and like some, I have a very very old computer and simulations kill my machine. its one of teh few hair styles i use so I know it looks good when rendered.
fur, i just render as is mostly.
i hope to eventually upgrade my computer (got some expensively bad teeth to pay for first, ug) but the updates in Daz Studio capabilities are so worth it :)
I have every single one of Chevybabe's hairs and most of April YSH's, and I love them. Quite a bit. Especially Chevybabe's. I prefer using them to transmapped hair.
Loving your latest, and getting it to sim a bit quicker after messing about.
It's like I said previously, there are some new processes to learn.
I actually did go ahead today and bought two of Chevybabe‘s dForce hairs (the double French braids and the sideswept updo) and also the curly bun for Gen8 which is a mixture of dForce and fibermesh hair I believe. I found that they do not take much longer to render than detailed transmap hair which really amazed and delighted me; and they really look awesome, except for the hairlines (my pet peeve with these hairs) which are just not natural enough for my liking yet. Still, I don‘t think it will be hard to add some postwork there, and the problem is not half as big as I thought it would be. Which is real nice I think.
The one thing that sort of annoyed me was that some of the hairs - I think Chevybabe‘s but might be wrong - do not show per se in Iray preview, and there was not preset or instructions given to make them do so. I had to sift through the forums here and after a couple of wring starts managed to find the line tesselation parameter and set it to 2 which made the hair finally show up. For me, it is important that Iray preview does work because I have to render using the CPU exclusively and thus do a lot of tests with the Iray preview before committing anything to a real render. So I wish the hairs were set up to show in Iray preview automatically, or that a preset was added to make them show up with just one click.
Apart from that they‘re quite pretty and a lot easier to handle than I thought. I‘m still using mainly the morphs for posing though.
Thanks guys :)
tsoroemi - I honestly had no idea the hair would show up in iray render preview ( it didn't in an earlier version of studio), so that's really cool :). Things have improved greatly since 4.11..I'll add that to my hair thread!
Yup they do, you just have to make sure to set the line tesselation to 2 not 1, it didn‘t work with 1. Real glad I finally got round to trying out your hairs!
DForce is really slow if you just push the Simulate button. I found that if you select just the items that can be involved (command select on the Mac), then use the little (kinda) hidden menu pulldown to the right of the Simulate button and push "Simulate selected", the simulation completes very quickly. I can now simulate items over and over during posing without waiting the hour for a default simulation. I have a laughable slow Mac Mini, and it works now for dForce.
The reason it doesn't show at 1 is that 1 is 'adjust ribbon so it faces the camera' which I am assuming is some special in-render calculation.
2 or more just generates a rather basic shape (ribbon or tube).
I prefer dforce. Took me a while to like it, though, but now I find it "falls" better and there's a lot less to no clipping, which I like. Some morphed hair, when you bend it, you need to go through all the individual bones and then some don't have a reset, and you have to go back and undo everything (some plaited and pony tail hair drives me crazy - made me prefer short hair for a long time), and it never looks right. I don't know. I get lost in morphs/moving hair.
For me, I like the ease of dforce and pretty much only buy dforce hair now.
I think it looks to thin, flat and lackluster compared to the strand based hair it's derived from.
I think dForce hairs and clothes are here to stay. It takes very little time/workflow to make them look natural.
Softcurls used with wind node.
She is a rather large woman!
The dforce dress looks great, however, the hair simulation seems to have had a few issues there. A reminder first that I'm only pointing at these things due to the relevance to the topic, aimed directly at the issues of the technology used and not to the image, it's a great picture!
For example the hair on her right cheek, clipping on fingers/forehead (there's something happening there anyway) and the noticeable repeating patterns of equal length hairs in the curls (which I assume is caused by dforce hair technology simulating at the guide level rather than the individual hairs level, meaning they all copy each other). The repeating patterns are much less noticeable at a distance however, and is an issue all technologies of hair seem to have with curly hair. It does also have the usual dforce hair thing of seeming to be made of thick hairs, but some people do have hair more like that.
That looks great Joe :)
Laurie
These are all problems that transmapped hair also has, so I don't really understand the relevance of pointing them out?
One of the things that makes dForce hair easier to work with, is the fact that you can do a lot to edit it/play with it. Here is a showcase of the base Grey Wolf and my own edits to its dForce fur.
I look at product descriptions and its unclear what they mean by dForce hair.... are they using the cloth dForce machine or this newer dForce straind hair.
I believe they added a new option to the drop down list so you can figure out whats cloth and whats hair.
I do like the transmapped Dforce hair and add it to many older ones myself
If you reverse that question, how are problems that frequent dforce hair not relevant in a thread about how and why people do or don't like dforce hair?
Basically everything on the list is probably solvable, and solving issues people have with a technology is the only way it will get better and more accepted.
I recently bought a particular one in the hope that I could get it to realistically drop forward if the figure bends down unfortunately it doesn't appear to work that way the bangs still stick close to the sides of the face bending backwards not forwards.