Thorn Hair and Beards questions
WillowRaven
Posts: 3,787
in The Commons
I just bought https://www.daz3d.com/thorn-hair-and-beards-for-genesis-8-males and have a question ... are the 'hair shaders iray' what we use to color the beards? And can they be used to color any or most hair sets? Lastly, how well do they convert to 3DL with the convert scripts?
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Hmmm... OMG, you're right. I have that product and after careful examination there doesn't seem to be any simple way to change the color of any of the beards or mustaches. They're brown, take it or leave it.
Lots of hair colors but no beards or mustache colors. Nor does there seem to be any beard or mustache colors using the other category "Hair Shaders IRay". How are my "Barbarosa" type redheaded pirates supposed to grow a red beard? Now I'm not happy with the product. Thanks a lot! 
Hmmm... I wonder if it's been less than 30 days since I bought this.
Just checked my order history. Guess what..., it's been 32 days! Boogers! I only paid $3.99 for it but now I think I see why it was marked down from $25
Yet, the advertisement page clearly shows a red beard.
You can remove all the textures used in hair shaders and apply them to any other fiber hair made in ZBrush. Moreover, if you remove the textures, you can change all the colors in the shader tree to your taste. As for 3DL, I don't know, I never tried to change them. When I render in 3Delight, I use them as is.
How is one to know when a hair or beard is a fiber hair made in zbrush?
I'm sorry, LeatherGryphon, lol. I am sorting and reorganizing all the products I bought during the recent sale and didn't notice any of the materials mentioned 'beard'.
That's OK, I'll survive.
The hair and beard styles are very nice, but I'll just kit bash from another beard set if I need other colors. Either that or I'll have a race of pirates with red hair and brown beards.
However, it is frustrating to not have easy access to beard colors. Every other hair/beard set that I have makes sure to include beard & mustache colors too. Glad I didn't pay full price for it. 
But what I'm not going to do is jump through hoops to tinker with colors. Posing yes, scene setting yes, props yes, fundamental skin textures yes, basic lighting yes, even shadows yes. But complex surface tinkering no, not my thing.
The included shaders work fine for the beard, you just need to select it on both the Scene and the Surfaces tabs when applying them. I've also used them on the eyebrows here.
So the color application works more like a shader than MATs ... right? If that's the case, can those colors be applied to almost anything in the scene?
The shaders have colored hair mats and some also have their Base Color changed (default is white), but the presets are not linked/locked to the beards. From what @Vuysur said it looks like she has done it that way so you can use them on other fiber hairs/beards. But since it's hair/beard mats they have they may not work well with other things.
Thanks :) Since this is my first time buying hair for any of the genesis figures, how can one tell if the hair buy is a fiber mesh hair or not after it's bought?
Technically fiber hairs are basically sort of the same as mesh hairs in that they both consist of strands of polygons, but the mesh hairs have a texture where a number of "fake" hairs share the same polygon strand, while the fiber hairs have a separate polygon strand with texture for each single hair. So in general fiber hairs have a lot more and a lot thinner strands than mesh hairs which usually makes it easy to see that it's a fiber hair/beard.
If you set DrawStyle to Smooth Shaded you can see the difference - on screenshot 1 the two hairs on top (Thorn hair to the right, Sonia Hairstyle to the left) are fiber hairs while the one at the bottom is a mesh hair (Adell Hair). But the Sonia fiber hair on top left left (screenshot 2) has hair strands that are a lot thicker than the ones on the Thorn hair on top right, and the thickness of the strands on mesh hairs generally also vary. So it's not always obvious to see.
The strand hair on top left is a Neftis3D fiber hair which generally have rather thick strands which can make it difficult to see whether it's fiber or mesh when rendered - it doesn't look much different from the mesh hair at the bottom (screenshot 3), while it's fairly easy to see that the Thorn hair is fiber. The textures of the two fiber hairs also look a lot different, the Neftis3D hair textures look rather diffuse while the textures for the Thorn hair look like a fairly sharp photo of real hair. Whether there is a more precise way to see what type it is I don't know. There are a couple of videos here, maybe they can reveal more, I haven't had time to watch them yet:
https://www.versluis.com/2019/06/an-overview-of-strand-based-hair-in-daz-studio-3d-shenanigans-20/
thanks :) Looks really complicated, lol.