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"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."
I do not own this hair so I can only speculate what you are seeing. My guess is that there are a couple things going on here. To me it looks as though there are very few guide hairs and very few pre sim hairs. I would think it may be a bit of an invconvenience to not be able to see the hair in the viewport but it must sim and render fast. Mine tend to be much more complex styles, so there are a lot of guide hairs. I also rely heavily on the pre sim hairs ( presim hairs by default are viewable) and the way I understand it, presim hairs are more accurate as they fall during the sim.
Pre render hairs are generated right before rendering. My guess is that almost all of the hairs generated for that particular style are PR Hairs. You can view them by clicking on the hair in the scene tab( make sure it's not the cap - demonstrated in the video if you are unsure) click on parameters: simulation:Preview PR Hairs: ON. This should help make the hair more visible in your scene.
Also addressing your question on the speed of simulations: Well (a) part of that is movie magic. I may have tried to speed up portions of the video so I don't bore you to death with watching my computer think and (b) some computer savvy people can jump in on this if the would like.. but I believe animating requires more processor power vs gpu power. So if the processor is lacking it may be painfully slow. Again, using the gravity option for the hair works fairly quick if you have limited patience waiting for hair to sim,
@jcade this is amazing!
I have a lot of issues with deforce hair in animations mostly that it looks like its shedding or falling out during the animation cycles. no matterhow much I try playing with the gravity settings it always seems to be sheeding..lol
you can see what I mean in the first part of this animation using deforce hair. other than the shedding part i like deforce hair
click to play best viewed in 1080hd
@chevybabe25 " but I believe animating requires more processor power vs gpu power."
To go along with that thought . . .
The following is my observation, based on using personal computers since the days of Apple II and Commodore, et. al.: A common refrain is "I have a pretty decent machine . . .16GB . . " For this kind of work, that's not "pretty decent, it's closer to barely adequate. 32GB is decent/ pretty good. 64GB is better, particularly for simulation activities. If you have 32 GB or more you can do away with your swap file for starters. 16GB doesn't' leave that much after Windows and Studio take their cuts.
Also, personally I love @chevybabe25 SBH hairs. I think they look outstanding.
Wow! That is a pretty cool animation. You did that all in Daz Studio, or did you use another program for the animation? I ask because I am only doing stills right now. I had to look carefully to see what you were talking about and concentrated on the girl in the beginning. I didn't see too much of an issue or perhaps I am not looking in the right place, BUT I had noticed that when the girl hugs her mother that a piece of hair on the back just dropped off. That's funny! I am wondering if you do a long animation, will your character eventually go bald?
Well, not everyone can afford a $4000 machine every year and mine is a couple years old now, but then again, as I stated above, I am not doing animations. So for what I do, I think it is a decent machine still. Eventually I will get into animations, but I am not there yet. Heck I am still figuring out how this dForce hair thing works.
Well, I figured it was the hair and I looked to see if I had something similar to what you used in your video and it turned out, I did! I have sku # MRL dForce Long Morphing Hair for Genesis Females. So I replaced that hair on the model I was using (Daenestra...she looks a lot like Rhianna to me), with that one. Now this hair behaved nearly exactly like the one in your video. I had a rough model of the hair in Texture Shaded mode to work with, and like with the hair you were using, it had controls in which I was able to set it a bit away from the body. The Tesselation worked and setting it to 2 or 3 was enough to allow it to give me a preview render. After everything was set in place, I hit the render button and the render attached below as the result:
While the simultions leading to this I certainly had grief with as I initially forgot to freeze the simulation on the dress and that messed things up. So I had to do it all over again. Also, it took a bit of experimentation to position the hair right in the simulation so that it finally gave me that result in which the hair just splays out over the bosom area.
I have to say that the end result is pretty nice, with this particular hair style. I am sure milage varies depending on the style, but I think this hair looks nice and the render overall came out really well. But following what you did in the video, all the extra time spent for, not only setting up for the dForce simulation of the dress, but also the hair does add considerable time to the creation process. Also juggling the settings so you can see the hair in the viewport is very tedious, but I quickly found out why it had to be done this way. Fresh rates in the viewport just slow to a crawl. Also, noting the memory consumpution on my end file, it was over a gig and I blame that on the hair. So it is definitely a memory hog.
So my verdict has been a bit altered from my initial post, but for the most part, I am still going to say that for general, overall use, I am going to stick with transmapped hair. Perhaps for some portraits and close up shots when I am NOT using dForce clothing as well, then I can see using dForce hair. I would say that the only dForce hair I would use in a general application would be the short styles like the one I used above. The tight close to the scalp hair usually doesn't even need to have a simulation run on it. But naturally I do like to make some adjustments to that type of hair and it doesn't seem like the Tesselation solution works. I also own sku# 64521 which is Afro Hair styles and this package behaves like the dForce Darcy Hair style I used above. I can't view it in the viewport either in Texture Shaded Mode or Iray Mode.
Ok, I will give that a shot to see if that works as I do want to get those African hair styles to work.
So basically everyone is speeding up the simulations Hollywood style, huh? As for what the computer is using for simulations and animations, I don't know. I know that when I first got into Daz Studio, I was only using the CPU for everything and that WAS painfully slow. So I managed to find a nice 1080Ti second hand and THAT has improved render times greatly and I think to a certain extent simulations have also increased in speed, but not to the level as I was seeing in video demonstrations. But if you are saying that most are usind a bit of "smoke and mirrors" to make their simulations look fast, then that is more believeable. I think you mentioned simulations taking about 10 to 15 minutes, and that is about how long it takes. Also in my case, I mainly run simulations using the time line, and I take it out past the final pose key point to allow for 'settling'. As you see with that dress the model is wearing in my render, those huge bell sleeves take a while to 'settle down'. But doing the hair as per your video and just selecting the frame in place rendering while freezing the dress render does take much faster to complete. I think the hair render took about 6 - 7 minutes.
Well, thank you (and everyone else) for your help.
So as I mentioned above. Unless I have a specific type of dForce hair that I want to use in a close up portrait style render, I don't think I am going to be using dForce hair too much. I am still looking to do some experiments with Strand Based Hair, but from what I gather most seem to be using that for fur or grass, so I am interested in it for that reason. But for the most part I have been getting along with transmapped hair just fine and some really well done examples have many adjustments and look great. For example the Carla Hair for Genesis 8 Females, sku #48175 is an example of a staple hair set I use all the time. It has a ton of sliders that allow one to change the hair to various different styles. So I just like the idea to set it up and can see it right away in the viewport in either Texture Shaded Mode or Iray mode. Using dForce hair just seems very time consuming. I know that it is still fairly new to Daz and perhaps in the future changes will be made to improve upon it, but as it is now, I don't see using it too much. I definitely will use dForce more for clothing than hair.
Geo
@jukingeo
Thank you very much for watching . The animation took me a little over a week to build sets ,animate and render it in iray. there were a lot of scene in it with different POV .
The hair falling is noticed best in the scene you describe. it does look like its pouring off her head I was using 3DU's Dayton the was deforce to begin with.. .lol I have render deforce hair up to 390 keyframes and the hair just looki like it was falling out but the head never went bald. I am not sure what cause the effect.
But I been having pretty good success with conforming hair props and converting them to deforce with deforce modifiers. In this animation below in some of the scenes I used a non deforce conforming hair prop and just converted the ponytail bones part of the hair set to deforce using a deforce modifier and the the hair never to appear to fall out of the hair. I was trying to achieve a dynamic ponytail look..
But it sure did crash studio a lot when simulating the ponytail, sometimes a lot of frames would appear to be freeze framed as well . But that was the first time i tried to deforce hair for animation with a conforming hair prop with just part of it converted to deforce. think that was the reason it was so unstable & crashed so much . But the results were still pretty good all things considering in spite of pony tail looking a bit choppy , I have refine the conversions process so i get better results now, learned to remove or add keyframes to make up for the choppiness of the ponytail I was using linda's ponytail https://www.daz3d.com/linda-ponytail-hair-for-genesis-3-and-8-female-s
But this was the first attempt at using conforming hair with deforce modifiers. its been a lot of trial and error some conforming hair does not like deforce modifiers and will just blow all apart no matter what you do.
Another cool video, but I can see you had more difficulties with the hair on the girl here. There were times it would freeze up and stop moving, then there was the moment where she was knocked down and half her hair disappeared into the floor. Yet, other times it looks as if Daz smoothing would take over and the hair would 'pop' into place. One of the more comical instances of that was at 1:57 where the ponytail was a bit flat and then it went "FOOMP!" back to it's normal size. (It probably would be even funnier if you added that "Foomp" sound effect to the clip. LOL! I am sure it was quite a challange to try and get that ponytail to cooperat and I can't even think about how long it takes to make something like this. I liked how you added the 'sweaty' effect in later on. I like to do that for my renders sometimes too. Usually with a fighting scene like that, most would just go with a Mulan style hairdo wich doesn't move around as much as a ponytail would, but then that wouldn't be as interesting. Definitely it was a valiant attempt, but I can tell you had your difficulties with it. Great job overall. BTW, how long did it take you to create that?
@Chevybabe25
I can't thank you enough for all your help, but this little bit of information in particular. THIS solved the issue of my not being able to see those Afro hairstyles in either the Texture Shaded mode or the Iray Preview. The first attachement below is one style taken fromt the Iray Preview. The next one was from another hairstyle from the same package. Since that particular figure looks a lot like the singer Rihanna, I decided to toss a piano and a microphone in that scene to make like she is singing. In this case, the dForce hair looks great, and further, because it is so short (and rigid style), I don't have to simulate it and it is kind of like using transmapped hair. Just before I wasn't able to see it in the viewport. But with your tip I was able to see it and hence I could position her hand behind her hair like that.
Iray Preview:
Full Render:
"Also, personally I love @chevybabe25 SBH hairs. I think they look outstanding."
Feelin the love
Fastbike :)
"I can't thank you enough for all your help, but this little bit of information in particular. THIS solved the issue of my not being able to see those Afro hairstyles in either the Texture Shaded mode or the Iray Preview. The first attachement below is one style taken fromt the Iray Preview. The next one was from another hairstyle from the same package. Since that particular figure looks a lot like the singer Rihanna, I decided to toss a piano and a microphone in that scene to make like she is singing. In this case, the dForce hair looks great, and further, because it is so short (and rigid style), I don't have to simulate it and it is kind of like using transmapped hair. Just before I wasn't able to see it in the viewport. But with your tip I was able to see it and hence I could position her hand behind her hair like that."
You're very welcome :) Glad I could help!
@jukingeo "Well, not everyone can afford a $4000 machine every year"
FWIW, I've never spent anywhere near that much for a computer. I also go 5 + years between new machines. One can almost alwys update a video card or CPU RAM. I also don't do animation. I'm in the USA and I know prices vary widely around the world.
Unfortunately, the dForce hairs I have purchased don't look as real as the best of the traditional hairs, such as from OOT. When this first came out, I was very excited, but I feel like it died on the vine.
(It does do African hair much, much better)
Speaking of OOT, that's one prominent hair vendor who hasn't touched dForce hair, or even hair "with dForce" at all. Windfield, Neftis and prae are a few others. They're doing well enough with their current techniques, so I guess they don't see the point.
To be honest, I hope they don't. Linday did a couple dForce SBH but then seems to have gone back to the cloth system...thankfully. I'm firmly in the "do not like" camp. For fur, yes...AM has proven that it can make for beautiful fur. But for human hair...not so much. I just haven't seen it. 99.99% of the time it just can't stand up next to transmapped hair by the top shelf vendors, especially when enhanced with additional shaders, such as Backlight, etc. And some of those hairs you can even apply (cloth) dForce to with a little determination and elbow grease.
I'm sure in time it will get better, but for now the hair (in general) just looks odd to me. And it's entirely too heavy on resources...which is saying a lot considering how heavy some of OOT's hair is.
I don't like it, generally. Part of it is how it looks in promos, but most of it is the lack of flexibility. From what I've read in the forums, you can only use dForce hair products on the character they were designed for. Most are for G8F, which sucks if you're like me and want to give G8M longer hairstyles. I've got one project in what feels like a permanent holding pattern because the hair I'd like to use is dForce/SBH for G8F, and I'm working with G8M.
Hair that's irrevocably locked to a single figure is worthless to me, no matter how nice it can look (with some effort). If the stuff didn't hog every available system resource, could be shared between characters, and looked better out of the box (or at least with a shader), I'd probably be all over it. But things aren't there yet, and honestly I'm not holding my breath. Not when some top shelf PAs have stayed the course with other methods. OOT's hair is still murder on my ancient, underpowered system, but at least I can autofit/convert it and it's easy to make it look like a million bucks.
There are some dForce/SBH products on my wishlist that I'll buy to play with if they get cheap enough, either because they come with both G8M and G8F versions, or look like they could be original, pre-SBH dForce hair that could be forcibly fit to other characters via autofit and stacked hair items. I'm even cautiously optimistic about the Bristol Hair working for a project I'm planning, assuming it doesn't make my computer try to launch itself into orbit. None will break That One Project out of the "why does this hair have to be permalocked to G8F??" rut, though.
many use hair caps for that reason, all PhilW's hairs do
When I first created the Afro Styles hair having PR Hairs On would REALLY slow down the viewport and was very taxing on the system - which is why it's off by default, to be easier on people's computers and viewport navigation. However, since then, I believe they've done some tweaking to the way Iray handles the PR Hairs and it seems to not be nearly as hard on people's computers as it used to be.
Those scenes look lovely, by the way! :)
@chevybabe25 Thank you for helping jukingeo and everyone else who you've been giving great advice and pointers to. It's much appreciated!
Well, if you only ever render a single character at a time, then it's workable. I tried loading up 2 sets of Rockz at their default settings on a character for science and my computer - 32Gb RAM,2080ti - said nuh-uh. Meanwhile, I can render 2 of Linday's curly hair with dForce, which are not lightweight, on two characters in an indoor environment without a problem.
That's encouraging to hear! Unfortunately, many of them make no mention of this, and I've seen the forum comments from people who made their own SBH, wanted to put it on another character, then realized they couldn't because they hadn't used a cap. As a buyer without the experience to make an educated guess about a given PA's dForce hair products, if I'm not explicitly told there's a cap up front it's easier to just get something else, rather than play hair roulette (especially during big sale season, when refunds can take weeks).
Chevybabe's Windflower Hair lists the cap and hair separately in the what's included section. OTOH, PhilW's Duchess Hair just lists the hair. It says it fits "most normal head shapes" and the promos feature "a range of characters," but every single one is an average female, suggesting that "normal" excludes stylization as well as things like cranial sculpting. That's why I haven't bought that very product, there is zero mention of a cap and the promos (+ one connected gallery image) don't give the impression that you can do anything with the hair beyond stick it on a G8F with limited shaping that won't distort the density, etc.
Now that I know, I'm more likely to give it consideration when it comes up on sale. I would buy and experiment with some of the nicer looking hair if I knew up front that there was a decent chance I could make it work for my boys. :(
I'm not 100% sure but I think Daz is unlikely to accept any dForce hair that isn't on a cap (at least hair that is meant for the head - body hair is likely a different story).
I'm actually a tad bit confused, I've never been able to render strandbased hair (neither on my own computer, or sending it to a render server I use). Mind you I only tried the Daz housecat and the hair on that one, it Always crashed my computer, with no exception at all, when I used the hair/fur. If I did the cat without its fur I had no problem, so I naturally assumed it was the strandbased hair that was too much for my old computer.
Than I ended up trying one of the hairs in the Honni bundle (the ezra hair, windflower hair doesn't install properly for some reason *grumble* ) and to my surprise it actually worked!
So my confusion stems from the fact that the actual hair seems to work, but the fur for the cat don't... so what is the difference between those? Does anyone know?
My guess would be that the fur is too "heavy" for your computer due to having more hair strands (since it covers the whole cat) and/or higher tesselation level.
Possible, though the ezra hair seems to be a lot of hair too.. oh well, least I know I'm able to do some strandbased hair, there is a few that I do like the look of, though most of the strandbased hair is not something I like much. And I quite dislike not being able to use my favorite hair shaders on those hairs :)
@ 3Diva you are very welcome :) "Thank you for helping jukingeo and everyone else who you've been giving great advice and pointers to. It's much appreciated! "
@ Cora Regina - I am pretty positive that most of the SBH hairs come with a cap that can be fitted to other figures. I think that the confusion comes from those that are making their own with the editor. All of mine have a cap.
"I'm not 100% sure but I think Daz is unlikely to accept any dForce hair that isn't on a cap (at least hair that is meant for the head - body hair is likely a different story) I am pretty sure Diva is correct.
I found that issue to be the case with longer hairs, kind of like the type that Chevybabe25 demonstrated in that video. However, the Afro styles that I used on that "Rihanna Look Alike" above aren't that bad and turning on the PR hairs doesn't slow it down much. But then again, these are very short hair styles and I had two styles like this that came with the Darcy bundle and up to now I couldn't really use them because I couldn't see them in the viewport. Now, If I went with a huge Afro style, like the kind that poofs out to the shoulders? That might slow the system down again. I don't know though as I have not tried anything that big in dForce Hair.
Thank you! The character is Daenestra:
https://www.daz3d.com/daenestra-for-angharad-8
When I bought the Angharad bundle, she was an add-on and I had to buy her because she looks like Rihanna and I am quite fond of her. She came out pretty good with those hair styles and I am happy I can use them now. Further, because these hair styles are so short, you don't really have to run a simulation on them. So that was an added bonus!
...yeah I've been working with Strand based hair and while initially it takes time the results of my initial experiments are encouraging. . I still need to work more with layering to get thicker body.
True, it is pretty much dedicated to the character it is designed for, but as J Cade illustrates above it can be styled and moved/draped in whatever way one wants, that with standard modelled & transmapped can often result in distortions. For example I can restyle it to match whatever pose I use as I am not limited to just the morphs supplied (and I find some hair content is really lacking in that department). As I only do still frame illustrations I don't have to worry about restyling from frame to frame. Pixar could pull it off with Merida, but they had designed custom software and hardware just for her hair as well as have a warehouse sized render farm.
My only misgiving is that there is no face zone in the setup figure for creating facial hair (important for male characters and one of the races in my SF story).
@kyotokid Ifyou are using the male bust in the developer kit, you can go to the surfaces tab and change the uv from cranium to face and cranium :)
Tip: if you want a skullcap, you can just use the geometry editor and delete the extra faces on the bust and save it as (figure/prop asset) with a new name. Then save the whole thing as a wearable preset.
Edited to add: as Kerya states, this is for your own personal use only.
Just a warning: you can't distribute hairs created with that skullcap, as it is the original geometry and that belongs to DAZ3D ...
You could just export G8F or G8M as an subD 0 obj to blender and model as skull cap over it & then import & rig like you work an article of clothing.
Sorry I just noticed this post - yes Duchess Hair is "grown" on a cap as all my dForce Hairs are - and my store is on sale at the monent due to the launch of LongFlip Hair. In general head shapes should not be an issue in my experience. The only issue is likely to be if the ears are an odd shape or size - even then it is worth trying. The best way to get a dForce Hair to drape as you might want it is to use an animated drape and apply the character shape (and pose) at say 30 frames so that the hair has a chance to adapt to the new shape, and allow say another 30 frames for the hair to settle.
@PhilW, I think you should consider doing a DAL webinar for using hair in DS.
I'll give that some thought.