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Fore hairlines, find one you like, then use it for other hairs; I use a PhilW one if the hair doesn't have one.
It is usually necessary to adjust it when it's not for the hair one is using, but is worth the effort, and usually only takes a few minutes.
hi, great post i have skipped though some of it so forgive me if i'm repeating something already mentioned."do i like the dforce hair?"
yes i do but with huge caviates. is it better than what has been available before? yes. is it perfect? far from it. the built in DAZ
'strand based hair designer' is a difficult beast to navigate and it's hard to get any kind of really useful output (especially if you only have
a limited PC/Mac to work with). has anyone anywhere in the world managed to solve this issue? see pictured/attached
it looks to me like the point from the folical to the first few bend points, the first inch to inch and a half of the strand should
by default have far more points that it has so that it bends more natually as a curve. now if it's the case that this requires either a 'bias' setting or a 'point count' adjustment, let me tell you, i've tried just about every perrameter i can find and still not hit the magic one that makes the difference. i thought i was getting near with 'length itteration count' but results still seem unsaticfactory. even with 'collision offset' and 'yore angle' the strands just stick tightly to the head/cap. as you can see i've been using the dforce 'fem fetal' hair and the 'long straight' hair to get a starting point. i have tried to get results from the 'strand based' set up but i get even less of a useable result
from that [after many hours watching tutorials and making notes]
if i can't 'crack' this issue then the next few portraits i had planned for just aren't going to work. so if anyone has a solution - please please get in touch via this forum.
it's got a 'way to go' but it's getting there. the LAMH plugin does not work with any beneficial outcome on my machine but may work better for some.
it's now been quite some time since we had an update from the 4.12 [even the beta - which again has more bug to it on 'my' machine than the last stable version] we must surely be in line for major update soon. keep safe and thanks
Unfortunately I do the judging a book by it's cover thing. The promo shots for SBH don't encourage me to buy at all. I think it looks more fake, but totally just my opinion. The only SBH I own were included in Pro bundles and those I have accidently purchased. I model most of my purchased clothing in Marvelous Designer and have it drape and fall exactly as I want with much better results than dForce....and god forbid, even mange to open shirts up for guys, so the whole mechanic of dForce really doesn't cut it for me. But I see the potential and I'm not trying to poo-poo it, as I am sure the dynamic will get better and better, but not something I use presently.
Fur, on the other hand looks extremely good from what I have seen.
..agreed, as I do a lot of pose refining as well and waiting to run repetitive sims (be it hair or clothing) is a areal interruption to the workflow.
That said,,it is saving me a lot of money.
Thanks for the hint, I shall definitely try that!
a hehehe hohoho. it gets better. try a scene/project with two models with different dforce hair. the settings of one influence the settings of the second. i have the dforce companion
and no matter what settings are visible or not and even if you go to each model in turn and switch the 'visible in simulation' on or off
certainly as soon a you hit 'clear' in the simulation settings they both clear and both start again. i've tried 'memorize' - 'lock' - 'freeze' nothing separates them. you can only ever have ONE simulation set up in a project. the only way around this would be if you treat each as different renders and then re-combine them in a post art program [photoshop etc]
oh joy...not
@cupboard Don't hit the clear button :)
You can freeze the simulation of the things you are happy with, then just simulate again.
So long as you do the simulation separately and freeze the simulation for each item once done, you can have as many different sim settings as there are dForce items in a scene.
I often do this as dF hair often needs very different settings to dF clothes
thanks chevybabe25 and willowfan - "i've tried 'memorize' - 'lock' - 'freeze' nothing separates them. you can only ever have ONE simulation set up in a project."
to quote myself. not in my world apparently. i7-7700k-4gb~gtx1050ti~32gb ram~Z270 chipset m/board - win 10 pro latest. nvidia 'studio' driver latest
with or without the dforce companion
it's majorly buggy isn't it, that's becoming abundantly clear.
thanks anyway - stay safe
I've also split a hair up and made parts invisible to get the look I was after.
I still have one I can't decide on posting or not as not sure if finished.
Hello All,
Oh my! I had forgotten I posted this tread and when I came back today to look something else up, I had noticed this thread has 70 messages! Anyway, I do want to thank everyone that has contributed to the thread, but it is going to take a while to read everything. I did glance over some posts and it seems the door is swinging both ways and some like the dForce hair and some don't.
As it stands now, I am still avoiding dforce hair. While I have played with it, I just can't get it to look right. The biggest problem is that darker skinned / African characters seem to more and more come with dForce hair and I have not seen one where I really liked the look thus far.
Also I have noticed that the past three Pro Bundles that have been released do not have a dForce hair item. Both are standard hair. So I am not sure if that is just coincidence or people are more in favor of the standard hair.
Anyway, I will do some more in depth reading later on in the week and draw my own conclusions based on what is written here.
Hello All,
Ok, It has taken me some time to finally get through this entire post as I was constantly drawn away from it. So now that I read every single post through, I do have some questions. However, it seems like, out of 70+ posts to this thread, there are more that don't like dForce hair and are using the standard (I believe it is called Transmapped?) hair.
Ok, so I initially made this post in response to the hair that is clearly labled as dForce Hair in the Daz Store. Now it seems like something else was mentioned and that is called "Strand Based Hair, or SBH." So my question is this the same as dForce hair or not? Now while I have heard of Strand Based Hair before, it was mostly in context of something in regards to fur, body hair, or grass. So I was under the impression that it could only do short fuzzy things. So this can be a way to make hair too?
Finally, there was mention of using dForce on non-dForce hair. I didn't even know that is possible. Is this better than using dedicated dForce hair? If so, then how is it done? Also are the results visible in the viewport Iray render?
Now that last thing seems to be a big issue and I have ended up getting some dForce hair as a result of buying bundles. That issue with the viewport is unacceptable, however, I was reading that if you set the tesselation setting to "2", then the hair does show up in the viewport? Now is this the same for all dForce and SBH?
Overall it seems to be that there is much more that needs to be improved on in terms of the usage for SBH and dForce hair. While I am willing to experiment with it, the cost factor in time may not be worth it. From the one photo above with the 'tall woman', I could see the issues and frankly, I don't see much improvement over using standard hair.
As it is, I struggle enough with using dForce clothing and that can be hit or miss as well. Some outfits work beautifully and others don't and I guess that does depend on the creator as it does seem to be the case with dForce hair as well.
Personally, unless I figure certain things out, I am not going to purposely buy dForce hair, however, as I mentioned above, I have enough examples of it that came with buying bundles and I can experiment with that. Out of these bundles there is one stand out that I would love to get working properly and that is the Darcy dForce Hair, item number: 64887.
https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-darcy-8-hair-for-genesis-8-female-s
In the photos, it looks amazing and I do create African - African/American characters a lot. So this hair package would be great if I could get it to work right.
But for the most part I am going to stick with standard hair for now.
Anyway, those are the only questions I have and a big thanks to those that have responded to this.
Geo
I mean....I do appreciate the options and the effort...and, I don't want to get in the way of progress and all...but...I find it to be unnecessary for renders and animations. I'm sure it's just baby steps and the evolution of this product will blow us away eventuallly, but right now, seems like a bit of a time sink.
Stand hair looks wonderful when renderd but Dforce hair looks absolutely terrible. I assume they're working on the same principles of geometry rather than alpha maps, so why the difference?
It's one of Studio's strengths imo; more straightforward to use that Blender imo. (I do all my rendering in Blender, so don't buy dforce hair anymore.)
Properly shaded, it looks more realistic than transmapped hair ever can. It does need a cap, like transmapped hair has, to similite the follicle-growth from the scalp though.
Therein lies the problem IMHO.
@jukingeo I put together a small youtube video that demonstrates how to use strand based dforce hair along with using the NVIDIA preview. You can view it here:
I noticed that too. The variance in dForce hair coloring is better but the hair looks completely dried out, plastic, and dare I say it, often less realistic than decades old polygonal transmapped hair. The strand based hair looks very realistically shiny with a nice sheen and the color looks good but I'm only able to reliably have a single color so far. Well I did do a dalmation but that was a completely amatuer hair color map I made up with my mouse and Adobe PS Essentials. My attempts to apply an existing color map, like on the DAZ Seal, and have all those nuances of color come through on the DAZ Seal hair have failed. Such a shame because it's pretty decent except for that.
Ok, but one of my questions was what IS the difference?
Ok, thanks, I'll take a peek.
BTW, how do you get the simulations to go so fast? I think I have a decent machine (i7, 16gig 1080 ti GPU), and renders complete at a decent speed, but simulations chug along like a hippotamus climbing a mountain.
Also, how do you get the hair to show up in the Textured Surfaces?
Geo
one is hair sheets the other is polylines of various thickness(single, trianglar tube, cylindrical tube as you increase tesselation)
the first one anybody can create the second only PAs if using curves to simulate and tesselation on render
you can actually dforce fiberhair mesh, I do my Zbrush exports but it's very heavy, strand hair you could too a tesselated obj export/import but also very heavly likely to crash DAZ studio
the PA tool enables it to be simulated as curves
Animated simulations are slow. I had been working with a 980 ti and some were taking 10 plus minutes. Granted I up my stabiliazation and pose settings for promos.. they just come out so much nicer. If you don't mind being at the mercy of a pose, using gravity ( the video above demonstrates the gravity option)you can get results pretty quick ( around a minute ish depending on your computer's specs).
I don't understand your question about the textured surfaces. Hair is visible in the viewport, and renders. If you use the nvidia iray preview, you will need to change the viewport line tesselation sides from 0 to something higher like 2( also demonstrated in that video)
Your question about the difference between the hairs: There is dforce strand based hair that is dynamic that I personally make along with phil and Aprilysh. These hairs are made with guides and then Daz generates additional hair within the program itself. It's actually quite cool.
There are vendors like Linday and Biscuits that make hair from tubular geometry that has dforce cloth applied to it. These are transmapped like traditional hair.
Nope I don't like strand hair at all
Never use it
Very limiting
Super unnatural looking
Traditional hair is so much easier to pose exactly how I want it
For the record all of these are sbh made by me right in DS. It's an absolute memory hog but boy is it pretty and so much easier to control (look at that last one it's looped around her finger
Fabulous work!! You should become a PA again.
Ok, so I have one model series better than your card. Probably not too much of a difference there, but the similutions are definitely slower than what was in your video.
Sorry, my bad, a fart of the brain. I meant to say Texture Shaded mode in the viewport. I attempted to use the Darcy dForce hair I mentioned above. I did follow the video with the line tesselation and it didn't work in the Iray Preview although it does work in a straight render. I set it to 2 and then 3 and the results are in the attached photo below for the Iray viewport view. You can see fine hairs, but that is it, no full preview of what the hair supposed to look like. Also in the next attached photo, that is what the hair looks like in Texture Shaded (that time I got it right) mode. Nothing like the full head of hair you were able to manipulate with the hair you used in your video. So, what is happening here? This is clearly not doing like your video illustrates. Is it the fault of the hair design? Should I try something different? The last picture is the actual full render of what the hair supposed to look like.
So is strand based hair also dForce? Or is it the other way around. It seems in some conversations dForce and strand based is used in the same sentence like you just did above and others seem to treat it as two different entities. So I am quite confused on what is what. Perhaps pictures or visuals would help in identifying what is what.
So then what you described above is Strand Based Hair, and what you mentioned in this sentence is dForce hair? So for the one thing I seem to get straight is that transmapped hair is traditional hair.
@J Cade Yes, I can see that, the last picture is the best looking. But if you look at my attachments, that one particular short cut looks pretty good for dforce hair. Granted there is nothing really that has to be simulated there. But I was just illustrating the problems I am having in regards to viewing the hair in the viewport. The second to last render the hair doesn't look too bad, althought he woman you selected looks like she is ill. LOL! But the first two look utterly fake. Especially the first one. Her hair looks like purple Cheese Doodles.
@Barbult What's a PA? ....Personal Accountant? Party Assistant? Or my best guess would Professional Artist? Yes? Or am I totally on the wrong track.
@ChevyBabe25, I guess I will try out some other dForce hair and see if I still have the same problems.
Thanks!
Geo
Daz keeps changing what PA stands for. I believe the current definition is Published Artist. That is, someone who sells products in the Daz store.
J Cade I think you are confusing Standbased hair with Dforce hair
Yes Strandbased can look very real and can be styled by the user
you cannot style the dforce strandbased hair, just alter parameters and run sims
The offical DAZ Studio "Dforce Hair" is built with strand based hair by PAs. PAs have access to additional tools to allow them to make it dforce hair. If, in texture shaded preview mode, you see guides instead of hair, that is strand based hair. If it's made by a PA, it may be Dforce hair.
Before Dforce Hair existed, some PAs were modelling hair using tubes (or possibly ribbons I suppose), and using the cloth dforce options that were created earlier. Because there wasn't anything else with the name, they called it "Dforce Hair", since it was using the dforce engine. So it is a hair model that is using "Dforce", but it isn't the offical "Dforce Hair" (which is always strand based).
nah Barb it's Premier Artist, it used to be Published Artist
Are you sure it isn't the other way around? Look at what Daz says on their publishing page. Honestly, who cares what they keep changing it to. It just means people who aren't Daz employees who sell stuff in the Daz store. I think we all agree on that.
well then they changed it again
like changing undies