Matching hair color between styles

cooldevo

For a visual novel I'm working on, I have one G8F character that has 3 different hair styles: one down, one tied back, and an updo. They are pretty close to the same length and thickness, and the styles work without a glaring difference. The problem I have run into is that the character has red hair and the three hairstyles have very different interpretations of what they consider red. The first has 3 different options (light red, bright red, and ginger), the second has two (OrangeRed, and RedOrange), and the other has two (RedHead and NaturalRed). After comparison, and having another pair of eyes look at comparing the tints, the differences are far too noticeable between them all. I don't need 100% match, even within 70-80% should be close enough to be not noticed. Depending on the day, all three could be used... on most days two of them will be used (down and tied back).

I tried searching around online, and thus far the best page I found was a guide showing how to change hair color using the Surface Selection Tool. This guide does work to change them independently of each other. That said, when I tried to match the Base, Translucency, and Glossy color settings they still don't match enough. There are about 40+ other possible settings in the Surfaces pane, but copying each down by hand and then manually re-entering them is a lot of work for something that might not work at all and isn't retained outisde that one use. I haven't tried doing this yet, as it's a lot of work and it may not work, so figured I'd check here first.

What is the best way to get reasonably believable color matching between different hair styles? Or is the best route to manually copy all the Surfaces settings and enter them on the two other hair styles when they are added/used? Or perhaps, I'll just have to make do with one style to be used for all occasions.

Thanks!

Richard Haseltine

One option would be to use something like https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-hair-shaders-for-iray or https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-extreme-hair-texture-blending-for-iray-and-dforce-hair (assuming you are in Iray). Most hair is mapped in much the same way so it's usually possible to swap materials around or use a generic set like those.

cooldevo

Richard Haseltine said:

One option would be to use something like https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-hair-shaders-for-iray or https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-extreme-hair-texture-blending-for-iray-and-dforce-hair (assuming you are in Iray). Most hair is mapped in much the same way so it's usually possible to swap materials around or use a generic set like those.

I am using Iray.

My hairs thus far are all dForce, and the Extreme one specifically mentions it, so I'll look at that one. I'm a bit nervous to purchase something upfront that might not work out, which has happened to me before often with environments. But this might be a pretty safe bet for what I need...

Thanks!

MimicMolly

Xtreme is good IMO. It uses a custom shader that can be applied to both SBH/dForce Hair and the transmapped/dForce Cloth Hair.

Anim

Copying surface (no need to enter values manually):

You don't need to copy each value manually from one surface to another. There is a "copy surface" and "paste to surface"  function.

Keep in mind, it will also copy the textures. This might not give the desired results because often the appearence of hair is driven by the opacity textures. E.g. if you copy a surface from short hair to a surface of long hair the copied opacity might not work well. In that case remember which opacity texture was used before pasting and assing that texture manually after pasting.

Saving / applying a shader:

Instead of copy / paste the surface you can save the shader of the surface (select surface -> File -> Save as -> Shader preseet). It will then be in your library and you can use it like other stored items. If you click and hold CTRL before double clicking the shader preset it asks you if you want to keep or replace the textures of the target surface.

EDIT:

If you want to keep the dforce / simulation settings of a hair you should first save only those values and later on load them back.

To save: File as -> Material preset -> choose location and name -> deselect everything exept of simulation settings

Once done you have them as preset in your library.

cooldevo

Thanks @Anim, it looks so simple when it's explained, but there's a near-zero chance I'd have just stumbled across that.  At this point, the simplest path would probably be to use the Xtreme as there's far less chance to break or forget something. It looks like it should work with eyebrows as well, so they can also have a more matching color than some of the figures have. Thanks @MimicMolly and Richard Haseltine (not sure how to tag a name with a space in it).

I've been playing around with random rendering and dForce with free objects and things for a few dozen hours so far, just to see what I can do. My initial plan was to make up a text-based interactive novel where you make choices. But then I decided that wasn't challenging enough so I'd try to make it a visual novel and do my own renderings as well as the story.

 

Thanks for all the help and recommendations!

Anim

You are welcome

onix

@Anim This is not necessarily going to work well. unless hair has the same texture style. althoigh it may be the best choice if it works.

an alternative method would be to color the hair yourself use photoshop or or other graphic editing software to change texture color.

or you can replace the color texture with blonde white hair texture and color it using a color picker in daz

also, you can make a small color adjustment that way and probably it will make colors similar enuogh