Hair Conversion Issue: Virtual World's Edwardian Hair

JOdel

The hairI am trying to use is Virtual World's 'My Edwardian Hair'. And Yes, I do have Propschick's older Edwardian hair as well and if I can't get the VW wig to work, I'll use that. But someone may have had better luck.

It's an Iray hair set. I'm trying to convert it to 3DL. I've tried Disparate Dreamer's Hana Hair shaders. I've tried SickleYeild/Riversoft Art's Iray to 3DL shaders. It *looks* like it's converted. But it doesn't render.

The Screenshots are of the hair in the viewport and of it in a spot render. This is just using the headlamp This attempt is the Hana hair shaders. The SYRSA shaders show even less of the hair. This version at least shows aome indication that there is a wig there.

Anyone got any better suggestions?

Sven Dullah

Hi! I've no idea what shaders you are talking about, and don't have the hair model. Why not simply convert the hair surfaces to OmUberSurface and reload the opacity maps, make a progressive testrender and go from there?

MelanieL

I assume you mean the bonus hair shaders from the Hana character by DD? Have you followed the instructions in the ReadMe:

• Hair shaders should have the corresponding shader base applied first (AoA shader applied before using the AoA hair shaders, the omHumanSurface Shader before applying the om Hair shaders, the iray shader before applying the Iray hair shaders). If the shader base is already applied, the shaders will not over-write opacity. If you switch between Iray and 3Delight shaders, they will loose opacity map settings and will need the opacity maps to be manually re-applied in the surface settings.

JOdel

Well the SickleYeild/Riversoft Art Iray to 3DL shader was applied first. And the opacty maps restored. But the hair didn't render at all.I added the Hana shader afterwards and got that peculiar speculatity pattern from the hair. But the hair itself didn't render.

I've done this before with other hairsets but this one is being a real problem.

Tried a couple of other hair shaders. No render whatsoever. Only the hair cap rendered. Applied Omnifreaker's UberSurface. No render and when I tried to cancel, I got a program quit.

I don't know whether this is strand=based hair, or what it is, since the store page doesn't say anything outright. I'd expect it to be strand-based, since it doesn't have a clay render among the promos. But other vendors produce strand based hair which can be comverted and renders.

Sven Dullah

...so guys, if you call a shader preset a shader, what do you call a shader?

JOdel, after the crash, did you restart DS, load a fresh IRay copy of the hair, convert it to OmUbersurface and testrender?

I don't know if it's strandbased, you never provided a link and I'm certainly not going looking for it;) But if it is, you should have RSL shaders in your library for SBH. I don't, since I'm on DS 4.9 and use Garibaldi or wowie's AWE Hair shader for SBH or GB hair.

JOdel

Okay, here's the link:

https://www.daz3d.com/my-edwardian-hair-for-genesis-8-females

I'm pretty sure that it is strand-based. But hey, other vendors have done strand-based hair that converts to 3DL. I haven't reloaded the hair after crashes (this wasn't the first of them) A bit more experimentation found that with the old Lumina Hair mats (which I think were from gen4 era) applied, it rendered. However, the Lunina Hair mats have *no* opacity whatsiever, so it rendered as a blob. Re-applying any shader or shader preset to it made it invisible in renders again.

I tried applying the diffuse from a different hair set whatsoever (one of AprilYSH's) to the hair model, but that didn't render either. 

Sven Dullah

I'm pretty sure it's not SBH, looks like a combo of traditional transmapped hair with some additional fibermesh strands? In which case it should render with the standard 3DL shaders...

Are you sure the opacitymaps were loaded correctly and opacity strength was at 100%?

 

JOdel

Yes. There appears to be only one transmap for that hair and it applies to all the parts. I'm going to start over and just load the hair into an empty scene and see if I can get that to convert. If that works I'll merge the scenes, and replace the other copy. But this really appears to be a stumper.

ETA: Running Riversoft Arts conversion scrpt on the isolated hairset revealed that there is more than one transmap. I'm not sure where the two others were hiding. I had browsed the folder from the surface tab and not seen anything other than the one I was using before and the one for the haircap. Using the one with the least transparency at least go t*something* to render. It's a long way from optimal, but 've replaced the copy of the hair which didn't render at all. 

I'm looking into other possibilities. But I suspect that I may have to use the old Propschick hair after all.

It does appear to be fibermesh. It's definitely not old-style transmapped hair.

Sven Dullah

I often load two copies or make a duplicate  when converting complex hairmodels, I hide the IRay copy, so I can check which opacity map goes where etc. + all textures will stay loaded so I won't have to browse to find them. The last step (obviously), deleting the copy, making a testrender and saving a mat preset...

 

 

Virtual_World

JOdel said:

The hairI am trying to use is Virtual World's 'My Edwardian Hair'. And Yes, I do have Propschick's older Edwardian hair as well and if I can't get the VW wig to work, I'll use that. But someone may have had better luck.

It's an Iray hair set. I'm trying to convert it to 3DL. I've tried Disparate Dreamer's Hana Hair shaders. I've tried SickleYeild/Riversoft Art's Iray to 3DL shaders. It *looks* like it's converted. But it doesn't render.

The Screenshots are of the hair in the viewport and of it in a spot render. This is just using the headlamp This attempt is the Hana hair shaders. The SYRSA shaders show even less of the hair. This version at least shows aome indication that there is a wig there.

Anyone got any better suggestions?

Hi, thank you for your support acquiring my Edwardian Hair. I haven't worked with 3DL in a long time and have forgotten some of the tricks for rendering hairs in that engine and I don't have any of the products that you mention in your post that convert hair from Iray to 3DL; but I want to help so I tried to do a manual conversion to see the results.

Since I don't have much time, I decided to use a quick and easy method:

1.  I applied the DAZ base 3DL material to the Edwardian hair
2. I uploaded within the same scene an old hair that already had 3DL materials.
3. I copied that 3DL hair material and pasted it into the Edwardian hair materials
4. I replaced the pasted maps with the original Edwardian maps
5. I removed the opacity maps from the parented hair Layers (or sub-figures) that are extremely thin, like the bangs and back fringe because it seems that 3DL is not handling those maps well (I only left the opacity map of the skull cap and the main hair)
6. I removed the 3DL hair I used as a reference from the scene and rendered the image with the new Edwardian Hair materials.

The image is still rendering, I will post the final result after it finishes.

I Hope this info can help you. 

VW

barbult

Sven Dullah said:

...so guys, if you call a shader preset a shader, what do you call a shader?

They call it a shader. Hence the continuous propagation of confusion and misinformation.

Gordig

Sven Dullah said:

...so guys, if you call a shader preset a shader, what do you call a shader?

The distinction is less important in Iray, since almost everything uses the Iray Uber base, and different shaders are quite rare (prior to the introduction of PBRSkin, at least). 

Virtual_World

It is still rendering and the bangs area is still noisy; but I captured the rendering screen to show you how it looks because I have to go out and I can't post the final image until I return home later tonight.  

barbult

Gordig said:

Sven Dullah said:

...so guys, if you call a shader preset a shader, what do you call a shader?

The distinction is less important in Iray, since almost everything uses the Iray Uber base, and different shaders are quite rare (prior to the introduction of PBRSkin, at least). 

OK, this is deviating from the original question, but I think it is still important to distinguish shaders from shader presets. I understand why customers are confused. Daz won't even use accurate and consistent terminology in product names, product descriptions or asset categories. How can casual users be expected to understand the difference?

I actually have quite a few products that use custom shaders. I bet you do too. Each of these uses a custom shader, not just a preset for Iray Uber.

• HowieFarkes products like UltraScenery and UltraSceneryXT
• Several from V3Digitimes, like A Touch of Dirt and Xtreme Reshade and Tanned Skin products
• iReal Shaders for fabric and metal
• Paint shaders from Llamghaini Amenazador
• Translucent Fabric Shader
• Any recent OOT Hair has OOT Hairblending  Hair shader
• Dielectric (and other) shaders from DG Vertex products
• DA Big Ocean
• Reflection Designer
• OSO Blendy
• NVIDIA vMaterials
• Double Layer Denim Iray Shader (uses OSO Janus)
• Muelsfell Multilayer Iray Shader
• Procedural Gem Shader
• Toon Generation 4 Clothing has 3DU Multi-Layer shader.
• Default Resources has a lot of custom shaders: 4-Layer Uber PBR MDL, Architectural, Daz Iray PBR skin (which you mentioned), several noise shaders like Noise Perlin Glossy, Metal Brushed, Rubber Studded Black, and the new Simple OpenVDB MDL Volume, and more for carpet, fabric, asphalt etc.

I'm sure I have more that don't immediately come to mind.

Gordig

I agree that the distinction matters, and I've clarified that for other users in the past, but you listed a couple dozen shaders out of tens of thousands of products that overwhelmingly use the Uber base, so I'd still call that "rare". 

Virtual_World

Hi, It's me again.  Here there is the finished 3DL render. 

Please, note that I didn't optimize lighting neither render settings. I just wanted to test a manual conversion from Iray to 3DL because I don't have any automatic tool and I am not planning to acquire any of them because I am exclusively working with Iray these days. 

The only thing that I noticed is that you need to remove the opacity map from the bangs, back fringe and posibly the bun (those are very thin fiber meshes). 

Hope this can help you.

PS. Please verify the conversion scripts don't replace the original opacity map with their own.  The skull cap and the Main Edwardian Hair Figure should always use the Opacity maps that come with the Edwardian Hair.

Sven Dullah

Virtual_World said:

Hi, It's me again.  Here there is the finished 3DL render. 

Please, note that I didn't optimize lighting neither render settings. I just wanted to test a manual conversion from Iray to 3DL because I don't have any automatic tool and I am not planning to acquire any of them because I am exclusively working with Iray these days. 

The only thing that I noticed is that you need to remove the opacity map from the bangs, back fringe and posibly the bun (those are very thin fiber meshes). 

Hope this can help you.

PS. Please verify the conversion scripts don't replace the original opacity map with their own.  The skull cap and the Main Edwardian Hair Figure should always use the Opacity maps that come with the Edwardian Hair.

Hi, and tks for chiming in:) Just curious as to what happens if you leave the opacity maps in place?  I can't recall getting artefacts from very detailed opacity maps, so wondering if it could have to do with gamma settings (linear workflow, gamma correction on, gamma 2.20 and opacity map gamma set to 1)?

...and a noob question: I don't currently use Gen8 so haven't bothered to install it, could I fit this hair to G3 if I change the scene identification? It's a beautiful model;)

JOdel

Thank you so very much for the work-around. I'll be very glad to be able to actually use this hair.

Virtual_World

Sven Dullah said:

Virtual_World said:

Hi, It's me again.  Here there is the finished 3DL render. 

Please, note that I didn't optimize lighting neither render settings. I just wanted to test a manual conversion from Iray to 3DL because I don't have any automatic tool and I am not planning to acquire any of them because I am exclusively working with Iray these days. 

The only thing that I noticed is that you need to remove the opacity map from the bangs, back fringe and posibly the bun (those are very thin fiber meshes). 

Hope this can help you.

PS. Please verify the conversion scripts don't replace the original opacity map with their own.  The skull cap and the Main Edwardian Hair Figure should always use the Opacity maps that come with the Edwardian Hair.

Hi, and tks for chiming in:) Just curious as to what happens if you leave the opacity maps in place?  I can't recall getting artefacts from very detailed opacity maps, so wondering if it could have to do with gamma settings (linear workflow, gamma correction on, gamma 2.20 and opacity map gamma set to 1)?

...and a noob question: I don't currently use Gen8 so haven't bothered to install it, could I fit this hair to G3 if I change the scene identification? It's a beautiful model;)

I tested the hair bangs with the opacity maps in place and they didn't render in 3DL. I mean, they didn't show on the rendered image.  Because I wanted to do a quick test, I didn't convert the back fringe hair neither the bun to 3DL; but I am assuming it is also going to happen with them because their are very thin fiber mesh hair. 

Yes, you can use the hair with other generations; but have to change the supported figure or leave it as unsupported as I did in the attached image of Victoria 7.

Virtual_World

JOdel said:

Thank you so very much for the work-around. I'll be very glad to be able to actually use this hair.

You are welcome.

Sven Dullah

Virtual_World said

Hi, and tks for chiming in:) Just curious as to what happens if you leave the opacity maps in place?  I can't recall getting artefacts from very detailed opacity maps, so wondering if it could have to do with gamma settings (linear workflow, gamma correction on, gamma 2.20 and opacity map gamma set to 1)?

...and a noob question: I don't currently use Gen8 so haven't bothered to install it, could I fit this hair to G3 if I change the scene identification? It's a beautiful model;)

I tested the hair bangs with the opacity maps in place and they didn't render in 3DL. I mean, they didn't show on the rendered image.  Because I wanted to do a quick test, I didn't convert the back fringe hair neither the bun to 3DL; but I am assuming it is also going to happen with them because their are very thin fiber mesh hair. 

Hmm, so I'll get the hair just to prove you wrong. Nah, it's nice looking and will be perfect for testing wowie's new (as of today) AWE Hair shader build:) 

Yes, you can use the hair with other generations; but have to change the supported figure or leave it as unsupported as I did in the attached image of Victoria 7.

Tks, that's what I thought, will try to fit it (or parent) to G1

 

Virtual_World

 

Sven Dullah said:

Hmm, so I'll get the hair just to prove you wrongdevil. Nah, it's nice looking and will be perfect for testing wowie's new (as of today) AWE Hair shader build:) 

Tks, that's what I thought, will try to fit it (or parent) to G1yes