Fibermesh, transmapped, and strand-based hair

LaPartita

Is there any way to tell if a product is made of fibermesh, transmapped, or strand-based hair?  Also, is all dforce hair strand-based?

Gordig

Daz didn't do anyone any favors with the name "dForce Hair", because there were hairs made by Linday and maybe some other PAs before the introduction of SBH to DS that used transmapped strips of hair simulated using the cloth engine. Some hairs are still made that way, and if you're lucky, the "compatible software" will list dForce Cloth rather than dForce Hair. Some cloth hairs will still list dForce Hair rather than cloth, so that's not a bulletproof method for distinguishing them. Some PAs tell you in the description of the item that a dForce hair was made with SBH, curves or some other terminology that lets you know that it's SBH rather than cloth. PAs that make cloth-based dForce hair include Linday, Nirvana and FESoul, while PAs that make SBH dForce hair include AprilYSH, RedzStudio, ChevyBabe and Toyen. The latter's hairs aren't necessarily marketed as dForce, and many don't have simulation settings, but are made with SBH.

Gordig

Here's another thing to look for: some products include a "clay" render where the product is presented with no textures so you can see just the geometry. In the case of hairs, that means you see the hair without transmapping, as in this promo for dForce Manami hair:

That completely gives away that this is a cloth/transmapped hair and not SBH.

richardandtracy

I too wish all PA's were required to specify whether the hair is SBH or Cloth dForce. I have never been convinced by SBH when I've done renderings. It's probably me, but cloth dForce always seems to come out better (and frequently much better) in my renders.

Regards,

Richard

Sevrin

Gordig said:

Here's another thing to look for: some products include a "clay" render where the product is presented with no textures so you can see just the geometry. In the case of hairs, that means you see the hair without transmapping, as in this promo for dForce Manami hair:

That completely gives away that this is a cloth/transmapped hair and not SBH.

Except not really.  The description for dForce Minami Hair includes this sentence:

This orthodox hairstyle was created with Strand-Based Hair.  

Gordig

richardandtracy said:

I too wish all PA's were required to specify whether the hair is SBH or Cloth dForce. I have never been convinced by SBH when I've done renderings. It's probably me, but cloth dForce always seems to come out better (and frequently much better) in my renders.

Regards,

Richard

I'm very much the opposite. Transmapped hair has always looked off to me, and I almost exclusively buy and use SBH these days.

Sevrin said:

Except not really.  The description for dForce Minami Hair includes this sentence:

This orthodox hairstyle was created with Strand-Based Hair.  

It also refers to the hairstyle as "orthodox", so maybe we should take the description with a grain of salt. That is strange, though, because it definitely looks transmapped to me, and SBH shouldn't look like that in a clay render. It's possible that it was created with SBH, then converted into hair cards, making the description technically accurate but misleading.

Richard Haseltine

Gordig said:

richardandtracy said:

I too wish all PA's were required to specify whether the hair is SBH or Cloth dForce. I have never been convinced by SBH when I've done renderings. It's probably me, but cloth dForce always seems to come out better (and frequently much better) in my renders.

Regards,

Richard

I'm very much the opposite. Transmapped hair has always looked off to me, and I almost exclusively buy and use SBH these days.

Sevrin said:

Except not really.  The description for dForce Minami Hair includes this sentence:

This orthodox hairstyle was created with Strand-Based Hair.  

It also refers to the hairstyle as "orthodox", so maybe we should take the description with a grain of salt. That is strange, though, because it definitely looks transmapped to me, and SBH shouldn't look like that in a clay render. It's possible that it was created with SBH, then converted into hair cards, making the description technically accurate but misleading.

The planes may have been built from strands, in DS or in an external aplication. We had a lot of strand based hair like that before DS had its own Strand Based Hair.

FSMCDesigns

Richard Haseltine said:

Gordig said:

richardandtracy said:

I too wish all PA's were required to specify whether the hair is SBH or Cloth dForce. I have never been convinced by SBH when I've done renderings. It's probably me, but cloth dForce always seems to come out better (and frequently much better) in my renders.

Regards,

Richard

I'm very much the opposite. Transmapped hair has always looked off to me, and I almost exclusively buy and use SBH these days.

Sevrin said:

Except not really.  The description for dForce Minami Hair includes this sentence:

This orthodox hairstyle was created with Strand-Based Hair.  

It also refers to the hairstyle as "orthodox", so maybe we should take the description with a grain of salt. That is strange, though, because it definitely looks transmapped to me, and SBH shouldn't look like that in a clay render. It's possible that it was created with SBH, then converted into hair cards, making the description technically accurate but misleading.

The planes may have been built from strands, in DS or in an external aplication. We had a lot of strand based hair like that before DS had its own Strand Based Hair.

So fiber mesh?? I was under the impression that "strand based hair" was a DAZ thing and had never heard the term until DAZ come out with it.

Sevrin

It's a good thing that the people who name things at Daz went into this business rather than pharmaceuticals or engineering where that kind of confusion of terms could do some serious harm.

Gordig

FSMCDesigns said:

So fiber mesh?? I was under the impression that "strand based hair" was a DAZ thing and had never heard the term until DAZ come out with it.

Either Kobamax created the hair with DS's SBH editor before converting them to hair cards, or they're primarily a DS user and isn't as familiar with the term "fibermesh". It's also possible that they created the hair with some other hair editor that outputs curves rather than mesh, making the hair more comparable to SBH than fibermesh.

LaPartita

So to sum up: 

1. Dforce hair that is strand-based uses a "dforce Hair engine", while dforce hair that is transmapped uses a "dforce cloth engine." These work very differently, although I'm not clear how, and unless a vendor specifies which engine their hair uses there's no way to know what you're buying.
2. Transmapped hair (or "hair cards" ?) is different from fibermesh or strand based hair, except that transmapped hair can be created from strand based hair. Sometimes.
3. The term "Strand Based Hair" or SBH for short, may or may not refer to what Daz calls strand based hair, because other modeling programs seem to use that phrase to describe other kinds of hair geometry. 
4. As a result of #3, a product that describes itself as SBH may actually be what Daz calls "fibermesh"; fibermesh hair consists of strands, but is not what Daz calls SBH.
5. All hair products have geometry. This geometry may consist of planes, strands, mesh, ribbons, polygons, verticies, or curves. Some of these terms may be synonymous - sometimes.
6. Clay renders provide definative proof of what kind of geometry has been used to create a particular hair product - probably.

Although no one has said as much yet in this thread, everything I've ever read elsewhere agrees that how a hair product is made has a huge impact on how well Daz is able to run and render. This means that a user's ability to use a hair product is severely limited by their hardware. Shaders also come into play somewhere, presumably. So actually understanding what the heck people are talking about here has practical implications for even the most casual user.

And here I thought I was asking a simple question....!

Padone

I agree in general the product descriptions in the daz store lack important technical details and especially hairs are confusing a lot. The store seems more focused on sales than on correct product descriptions. I guess the only way we have is to get the product, then try it, then ask for refund if it's not as expected.