Any Hope for Hair Improvement
Leonides02
Posts: 1,379
I've been using Daz for four years now. In that time, I've seen a lot of improvement in skin, joint bends, expressions, and even clothing. However, I can't say the same for hair.
When strand-based hair came out, I had hope we'd see a vast improvement in realism. Unfortunately, I'd say the opposite has happened. SBH looks worse than the old card-based hairs like OOT and others. Unfortunately, these are not dynamic. I do use a different product to make them dynamic, but it's hit or miss.
The problem with SBH, as far as I can tell, is that the strands are too thick. Now, I understand that thinner strands are way more expensive, computationally-speaking. But do we have any hope of a hair system similar to other 3D programs that use instancing and other tricks to create dense, yet thin strands?
Because, as of now, SBH looks like it comes from a video game made fifteen years ago. This isn't the fault of the artists, seemingly, but a limitation of the engine.
It's just frustrating because no matter how good we get the skin and textures of our characters to look, that hair still looks like it belongs in the early 2000's.
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Wow, I composed a message just yesterday saying almost exactly what you say but I didn't post it because I decided that I was being too negative. I don't use dForce hair because dForce is sooooo sloooow. And I have the same reservations about fibre hair that you do (thick fibres, etc.). I tend to use mostly OOT hair and a few shorter styles of fibre hair such as those from Redz. Even then, just the presence of fibre hair slows my viewport posing considerably.
If instances are used to lessen the computational load, then I think simulation would be off the table.
I agree that SBH as it exists in DS is just too resource heavy. It's frustrating since Iray has had native fiber primitve support (curve based hair without tesselation) since 2020.0.0, which was included in DS in April of 2020.
Maybe this is being looked at for inclusion in DS5? It would be a pleasant surprise.
- Greg
Couldn't you instance after the simulation?
And I didn't realize how right you were about this solution already existing.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/optix-sdk-7-1/
This looks great.
Is this in the works for Daz? As ever, I wish they were more transparent about what (if any) features they are working on besides "source maintenance."
Only if they were simulated strands that where identical in geometry, which would be rare.
I agree with all the other posters. I have a pretty decent machine, 64GB of RAM and a fairly powerful GPU, but even I think SBH is pretty much unusable. The scene file bloats to a massive size at times if you save after simulating it, and the RAM requirements when rendering can exceed even the 64GB I have. Yes, you can tweak the settings to make the hair less dense, but as stated above, it will often look as bad, or worse, than older hairs that consume far less resources, so what is the point?
I was also hoping we would have seen products using native iray lines by now, but so far nothing, nor even rumours that it is coming.
+1
On a side note: I also wish that hair wouldn't take the best part of an eternity to render in 3Delight.
...I remember back in the day when I was still on my old 32 bit notebook I attempted to render the A3 Mentha Piperata character with that incredibly frizzy hair. Once it got to the hair I appeared to stall out for over an hour with not even one tile rendering (though amazingly didn't crash) Even after I built my (then) beast of a 64 bit workstation with a 4 core/8 thread i7 and 12 GB of memory, running Daz 4.0, it still appeared to freeze just after the process got to the hair I had to stop the render, turn translucency off and it finally finished though it still took bloody long.
I don't know how anyone with a 32 bit duo core system with the 2 GB memory allocation could ever get it to render as I was throwing 8 CPU threads and 12 GB of memory at it.
I've found it depends largely on the artist though. Then again, I primarily aquire Daz assests to export OUT of Daz, so I really see the variations.
LAMH for example, when using the Full version with the Editor, you can control the base & tip thickness, density, etc. and really get some nice looking fur/hair.
I can't use dForce hair outside of Daz though as it doesn't export geometry I can use ... yet.
But, this also depends on how your lighting & rendering of course. So, perhaps some visuals as to your issue...
What product do you use? Everything I tried was all miss, but no hit.
But I didn't use products but DA and YouTube instructions so maybe there's still some hope.
no hope as long as DAZ locks the creation of Dynamic Strandbased hairs to Premier Artists only because the end users can only use what is available, so any innovative stuff rests squarely with them.
There are plenty of highly creative people who will never get to explore its potential so have to use other software like I do (but I lack the talents too so there is that)
I do grooms in Unreal now using Blender and can convert many mesh hairs too, don't think I will ever bother with DAZ hair again TBH
Innovative users can still make strandbased hair, and can edit existing dForce hair extensively, so it shouldn't be impossible for people to find solutions and take them to Daz as potential products.
you assume they want to sell them to others though
I am glad they have bridges
I'm in the same boat, after messing around with several hairs that looked good in the store renders, after loading them into daz I could never get them to look half as good as the render. At this point I just literally won't buy any hair product if it says that it uses dforce. I was super excited when dforce hair was announced, it's just such a bummer it has been such a dud in my experience. As painful as it is to say, I get better results sending a normal hair products to zbrush and resculpting them hair by hair, as painstaking as that is to do. Then again, I should have known, as I'd rather export a clothing item to marvelous designer to simulate than use dforce on a simple clothing item in a complex scene.
IIRC Linday and Prae hair use dForce cloth physics on polygonal models. With other vendors I never know if dForce hair is strand based or not so I avoid it. I only got two strand based hairstyles and both were rather so-so for the effort of running simulation for strands.
...the downside some of Linday's hair products is they have H-maps based on G8 figure so if you are looking to use them on an older generation Genesis character (like G3 or G2) applying any of the texture maps other than the default one will give an error message.
I like SB hair, but yeh there is defo room for improvement.
... I haven't bought an OOC hair (was previously one of my go-to PAs for hair) since SB appeared.
I have various hairs by Linday and the only one with hierarchical presets is dForce long wet hair.
Anyway, there's a way I found to make H.Map presets work on older versions:
1.) Autofit or parent the hair to the figure.
2.) Select the Figure. Then, in the scene tab, click the options button (the button with the triangle and the 4 horizontal lines)
3.) Go Edit>Scene Identification
4.) Change the NODE NAME from, let's say, Genesis2Female to Genesis8Female (or Genesis2Male to Genesis8Male)
5.) Now, with your Figure selected, apply the Hirarchical Preset
6.) IMPORTANT: Don't forget to change the Node Name back to what it was, for example Genesis2Female
This also works for applying hierarchical Skin Presets for G8 to G3 (but not older generations because the geometry doesn't match) - Note, this will not change the eyelashes.
I have quite a few hairs from OOT, but I find that I never really use them because they are typically too "poofy" or voluminous to be convincing (obviously not counting the updo styles, which I do use quite a bit). I consider myself pretty good at applying dForce to standard hair to tweak it and fix things like being too poofy, but I have yet to successfully apply any dForce at all to an OOT hair.
My favorite hair makers are AprilYSH (thankfully they seem to have given up on SBH), Windfield, and Linday.
I get your point on the "poofy" thing. My solution has been a quick trip to Blender to reduce the volume and save as a morph. I know that shouldn't be necessary with products that have gone through QA but it is not unusual for me - I add morphs to almost every item of clothing I buy too.
...Primaera Hair also has hierarchical presets as I recently discovered to my frustration.
I usually use manual parenting and fitting as that preserves all the styling and movement bones as well as avoids any possible distortion. Been doing that pretty much ever since I started in this./ Hair is one of the easiest assets to manually fit as you only have to deal with the head region.
To get around H-presets for changing hair maps, I went to using Slosh's UHT2 hair system. as Primavera (and I've noticed some other dForce hairs) uses the Metallicity channel and when I rendered the hair using the base colour it loads with, the highlights were way too shiny to the point of almost looking unrealistic.
As to hair volume, most long wavy hairs don't have enough I looked at Classic Long Curly Hair by the same vendor (which does not have H-Maps listed) but it didn't have the same length and volume I needed for a couple characters. This one also uses the Metallicity channel for highlights.
I know ZBrush better than I do Blender (which isn't saying much). How would I go about reducing the volume of a hair? I come across this issue with so many hairs...once they're loaded there is so much volume to the crown area that it looks like a parade headdress rather than hair. I really don't need my girls looking like an ad for Aqua Net.
That's why I really love Linday's hairs. They have entirely too much volume out of the box, but as they are made for dForce, I can adjust the environmental settings to add more gravity and take a lot of the "poof" out.
The reason why Primavera has hierarchical presets is because of the numerous geoshells, so it applies the materials to the hair and geoshells at the same time. But, Linday's hairs typically take very well to third-party shaders. I almost never use the stock hair colors and instead use Backlight shaders, which look amazing on pretty much every hair I apply them to (AprilYSH's hairs need some tweaking as those hairs use custom UV's rather than standard vertical UV's).
I recently did this piece (this is a cropped closeup for the hair), and it uses a pretty heavily modified Primavera hair. I adjusted the environmental settings to add more weight to the hair and make it less poofy, and then simulated it once. Then I saved it as a morph and simulated it again with even more gravity. I also swapped out all but one of the material channels with Backlight shaders (so one material channel is still using Linday's textures).
My preferance is non-transparency mapped hair but SB or polygonal-based hair often doesn't look great when rendered, the exception being some short male hairs that look very nice.
That looks fantastic. Well done.
I have tried ZBrush in the past and I think the sculpt brushes are similar in function to Blender. I just use the Grab (Move in ZB) tool and push the mesh in towards the skull cap. I'm sure there is a better way of doing it but I am not a modeller. In fact I use that brush almost exclusively which tells you a lot about my lack of skills.
I tried it with some fibre hair and that is a different proposition entirely because each strand is an individual mesh. Much easier with ribbons than strands.
...kind of reminds me of some promo images of the Pixar character Merida though more realistic looking.
Yeah I was a little surprised that Shosh's UHT2 worked on G8 Hair as it came out when G3 was the latest generation. Not very well skilled with dForce yet to do some of those changes as I have old hardware and particularly with this hair, takes a long, long time (about 4 times "as advertised") to run the simulation because of the geoshells..
Hmm Backlight Shaders are currently on sale, the only thing is in some of the samples ther is mention of special light sets like Painter's and Boss Lights. I don't have any of those sets but just use the standard Iray lighting and a few HDRIs.
You definitely don't need any special lights. I don't have either of those. Most of my primary lighting is done with HDRI and to get the 'backlight' effect I use a spot pointing at the back of the head and sometimes an additional rim light. I usually turn down the backlighting to the lowest setting because it can sometimes be overly strong. I really like the softer look you get with these shaders. Here are some examples -
Linday hair, without a backlight spot -
Linday hair, with backlight spot -
Linday hair, with backlight spot -
LIttlefox hair, with backlight spot -
Windfield hair, with backlight spot -
Windfield hair, with backlight spot -
OOT hair, with backlight spot -
Mix of Soto hair, OOT hair, and an old Goldtassle hair, with backlight spot -
AprilYSH hair, without backlight spot -
AprilYSH hair, with backlight spot -
...those do look really nice. OK in the cart it goes.
You'll like them. I use those Backlight shaders on everything ;)
I like AprilYSH hairs, and have all their SBHs; as there are bones in their modelled hair, I might buy it if it is very low-priced.