Oh where oh where is my hairbrush
jason-2455927
Posts: 51
in The Commons
Hope you get the reference in the title. I'm working on making strand based hair in daz studio. Yes, I found the hairbrush...and the other tools. But I am having the hardest time styling the hair!
Yes, I can make a mohawk but that isn't really too hard. You don't have to comb it, part it, or really do any shape work. But does anyone have tips for actually styling the hair? For example say that I wanted to make a ponytail in the back and a part on the left side with the right side of the hair flowing slightly down the front of the forehead and brushed to the right?
Tips? Advice?
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Comments
Jan Versluis gives an introduction here you may find helpful
For me, there are 2 things that I find most helpful:
1. Grow your hair on a haircap instead of the figure itself. Not only does this allow you to save/use the hair more easily in the future, but it also allows you to control the number of verts. I find a haircap mesh that is less dense that the figure geo is easier to work with.
2. Learn to use the selection tools. I find it's much easier when not trying to comb all strands at once.
HTH.
- Greg
haha Yeah, I got the title reference and now that song is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the night ...thanks. lol
I don't know if you're using the beta or not, but I don't recommend using it for creating strand-based hair right now. At least the beta version I have right now, the tools are messed up.
I'd recommend using the full release version of Daz Studio for making Strand-Based Hair, if you aren't already.
As for styling, you want to start with the hair pretty short, start styling it while it's short, then increase the length, and style it some more, etc. This seems to be an easier way (at least to me) for creating longer styles or more complex styles.
I made a mini-tutorial a while back, you might find it useful: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/335676/strand-based-hair-mini-tutorial/p1
Yes I'm using the full version. I had already found your tutorial as well. Thanks for that. I did learn a couple things when I was just starting out from it. Oh and Sevrin, I'll check it out. I already had seen some of it but I think I was in a little too much of a rush at the time and didn't get too far into it.
Yeah, just watched the full video... looks like his understanding of it is actually a little bit behind mine. The main problems I'm having right now are how to keep the hair from getting stuck in the mesh of the ears or other places, and how to comb the hair in 3d space. Because I seem to get it the way I want it to look on the z or x axis but then after working on the y axis the z or x one has become messed up.
Yeah I usually go back and forth between the to views a bunch.
although if you uncheck "retain curve lengths" it will smooth a bit but will keep its shape a bit more.
More generally
I also second starting with short hair in particular to fiddle with clumping and the rest there are some great tools especially for naturalistic short hairstyles (on the other hand the clumping is much more fiddly on long hair, it loves to clump throught the figures head)
using a scalp mesh rather than the figure itself has some major advantages - and some disadvantages. As mentioned, If you know whyt youre doing you can set op the geometry to your advantage (you cannot do a dead center part on the figure for instance) and you can use the same hair on multiple figures. on the other hand if you're doing long hair you kind of want to know where the shoulders and all are and you can only see the mesh that the hair is growing out of. Now you can make something more like a bust rather than just a cap or the figure, but I usualy end up being too lazy and just use the figure.
also if you're looking for more info in the forums you can also search for garibaldi which is the old plugin the current tool is based on. it has remained quite similar so most of the tips in the old garibaldi threads are still relevant if you feel like digging through old forum threads
This is a hair test I just rendered in 3DL. Ignore the red scalp, it was a test I did before. I took some advice from here on shaping the hair short first and then grow it. I also found that setting the brush to a lower strength helped with some of the fine tuning. Also, thanks for the tip on turning off the preserve curves. I was able to grow ONLY the hairs I wanted to grow so that helped A LOT!
It ALSO helped because it got me thinking about the OTHER checkboxes. Turns out if you uncheck the mask hidden box you can comb the left side at the same time as the right side. That saves A LOT of time. I also want to provide another tip to those like me who found using the rotate icon in the workspace to be limiting. You can actually go into the windows>workspace>customize and set your middle mouse button to rotate the workspace as well, Somthing I didn't know until tonight!
So again, the image here is just to show how I am coming along. I'm curious about how to get it textured right though. The default isn't good looking and I can't seem to find a place in the material editor to change it up. I'm also using 3DL to render because I don't think my computer can handle iray. So any suggestions for that?