Garibaldi Express: Hair and Fur Plugin Beta [Commercial]
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I seem to have found a bug in version 14.
Create a new Garibaldi hair.
Go to Distribute
Select some of the hair and then Create a new selection list
Now, without deselecting the list, use the selection tool to try to select something else.
Garibaldi freezes and the program is unresponsive. I must force quit in order to relaunch Garibaldi
If I deselect first and then use the select curves tool, then no crash occurs.
This problem seems repeatable, and happens whether creating a new Garibaldi hair or loading a previously created hair.
That's probably part of selection issues I've been having. Using selections with "Show All meshes" visible also has the freezing problem. Freezing is also common when using "Mask hidden by surfaces" unchecked.
@ FutureBiscuit - I know your close, and prob dont want any requests, I was toying with creating eyelashes (I'll post a render soon, you inspired me :) ) And I worked out it wasn't a viable option to use "SkinFace" And instead found the best results actually distributing the hair from the actual "EyeLash" part of genesis. And I realized, It would be really fantastic If there were a button to toggle on and off the visibility of the model, as It's really obscuring the preview of the hair... In styling the model is great reference for the curves, but its all guess work when you go to clump and tweak since it's covered by the eyelash model in which it is distributed from.
Actually it is funny that the Garibaldi structure exported as OBJ is the same as I am using when creating hair in Zbrush for Genesis
it is easy too rig and use with DSON in Poser so the option is really great, beside it is much easy to manage the hair in Garibaldi than Zbrush anyway , thanks for the Obj exporting feature it really works great if you know what you are doing , also tried to edit the geometry after in Zbrush and worked so well , so even better ... very happy about!
Cath
It's in the file menu of the Garibaldi Editor window.
It will export the hair currently visible in the Garibaldi editor window. So it is recommended you switch to the tweak workspace during export.
To quickly edit the export hair amount you can use the preview amount percentage.
I would warn people who want to use this feature that it may create very large files and handling these files may be slow and use large amounts of Memory.
It's not something I've personally experimented with to any great extent. This feature was only added due to popular demand.
Sounds like we got a bunch of hair style products to come from you then :)
Well that is great thing for Poser users in this case or other software that don't support Garibaldi
the OBJ structure need to be the way it export in Garibaldi or it will not works so I am glad James did this so well
not to forget to mention that you can make the hair ticker or smoother after exported to geometry in DS 4.5 for distance or close up usage what is another plus , even using smooth modifier and collision with genesis what make you possible to put the fingers between the hair and avoid poke .. so the real deal here , the size for 10K is lower as in Zbrush so around 79K of poly where it would be 400K in Zbrush with the same subdivision level and segments , as the exported hair at minimal setting have 3 profile and 2-3 segmented what is more tan enough for simple sets like eyebrows, beards and other stuff as an additional sets so that is just a plus! to already wonderful hair
Wow, sounds like this was destined for you! :) I cannot wait to see what you come up with. I have always loved your creations
I will make some freebie prototype you guys can test out and see what I was talking about ..
That sounds fantastic, count me in :)
It sounds like Garibaldi can be a low cost solution to fiber mesh hair. It will be quite interesting to see the results.
Looks more and more like we are in for a real hair revolution this year.:-)
It does look like we are in for a fun ride with new and great hair options :)
Cath can you post some renders you have done with exported OBJ hair from GH. I only tried this once and didn't like the exported results but maybe I did something wrong or maybe it has been tweaked since I last tried it as that was a few Beta's ago.
Also I was not sure of the best way to retexture the OBJ so I ended up giving up on it. I would love to see some workflow notes on taking a GH node and exporting it and then using it in something like a Lux render so I can get my head around the process.
I really do have to try and make some GH wearables. I am playing with some renders using the wearable that comes with Beta 14. I needed to make a colour change and also found I needed to tweak it quite a bit... but it was still a great starting point for that style of hair so I loved it.... and I would love to be able to share styles easily with people I regularly chat to about 3D as we help each other learn and these wearables make it easy to transfer knowledge as well as technique examples.
Looking forward to seeing GH in the store, but I also don't mind if it takes a while yet to ensure the remaining bugs are ironed out.
I hadn't seen selection lists and I really do want to play with them as they would make life easier during styling... I will report back if I get similar lockups/crashes.
Is there any hint on when this will be ready for the store?
The selection list bug is confirmed and I reported it to James last week. He indicated that it was being dealt with.
From various comments made, I don't think there will be much more that 2 more beta rounds - unless something drastic happens. If that's the case, then I would hope to see it live in about a month - but that's just pure speculation on my part.
Like others have said, take as long as you need to get it right.
I have been experimenting around with Beta 13 and now 14. I have been using some of the demos from the Garibaldi site and have created a few examples of my own, that don't rise to the same level.
I must say that when using lights with deep shadow masks, you get very high quality renders very quickly. I have tried doing renders with ray traced shadows and uberarea lights and the results I have been able to get are not that good.
Is this because I don't know how to use that kind of lighting with this hair? I've been getting good results with normal hair, although high polygon count hair like fiber mesh can be very, very slow. Is there some limitation to the technology that it will always give better results with deep shadow mask lights?
Here are a couple of renders I did using a tweaked version of the Beta14 wearable.
In response to the post above about lighting I tend to get coloured artifacts over my rendes using deep shadow maps and these artifacts go away when I use raytraced shadows. It can take a few hours to render with raytraced shadows and the ECU below took over 7 hours but I have generally been happy with the results and renders like that I usually set to run over night. The original size of both of these renders is 2800x4200 which is another factor in why they take so long to render. I also only use standard lights... usually 1 point and 1 distant light both with raytraced shadows and sometimes a 3rd point without shadows if I feel it needs more light. The MCU below uses 3 points, one close to the face with shadows and one behind the head with no shadows and one for the guns laser... along with a distant light with shadows. I rarely ever use anything but 2 or 3 standard lights and generally I am happy with the results.
The coloured artifacts with Deep Shadow Maps are a problem with the current version of 3Delight.
Just for those that are interested (it has nothing to do with Garibaldi and Daz can't do anything about it but wait for a new version of the render engine).
Your render looks great!
Thanks for that info Kerya.... I mostly use raytraced shadows anyway and only tried deep shadow maps as it was what FB was recommending. I didn't realise it was a general 3Delight issue but that is good to know. :)
Glad you like the renders they have been fun to play with :)
Your renders look really good. The big difference between my attempts and yours is the hair color. I suspect I could get good result too with very dark colored hair. I was trying with light colored hair, and was getting very dark hair except for the outer layer.
I can try some more experiments with render parameters and see if I can get better results. I am hesitant to post my current results because they are probably due to my not knowing how to get a good render with this product.
Mark - there's an old saying "A picture is worth a thousand words". If you show us what you've got, then we will be better able to offer suggestions. Take a look at the early pages and see some of the stuff that was done before we started to figure things out. :-)
Anyway, here's an updated version of an earlier hair style I did. Threw on some eyebrows and chin hair that I did previously.
Well Gone you are certainly mastering this plug-in, that head hair is the best I have seen so far...outstanding.
Thanks, but the real credit has to go to Futurebiscuit for building such an easy to use plugin.
Most of the hair I've made is pretty primitive - usually little more than curl and surface attract. This hair is no exception in that regard. The clump and tweak workspaces provide the texture quality but the real magic is in the shaders. The shader is a simple no nonsense set up that is easier to figure out and use than the much more complicated omni shaders - but it obviously has what's needed to get the job done.
Like all good things, it works on the KISS principle. :-)
Personally, I can't wait to see what the real hair masters do with this jewel.
Here is a comparison of the tight waves example file with deep shadow mask and UberArea lights.
The left is rendered with the light setup from the example file which uses about 5 spot lights with deep shadow mask.
The right is rendered with two UberArea light planes on either side of the camera. Each of the UA planes is parented to a camera to for pointing. I pushed all the quality setting a little higher than what I normally use to make sure I got a good quality render.
Shading Rate was 0.1 - usually use 0.2
X and Y pixel samples 16 - usually use 4 or 8 unless doing DOF effects
Max Ray Trace was 10 - usually use 2
Samples on UberArea lights was 64 - usually use 32
The render time on the shadow mask example is about 3 or 4 minutes. The UberArea light render time was around 3 hours.
With the UA lighting, it seems like the light is not penetrating the hair. I seem to be seeing light mostly from the surface hair. The deeper hair is darker color. The overall effect does not look as natural to me. I increased the ray trace depth to 10 to see if that would help any, but I don't think it made much difference.
Hey Mark, I don't have a problem with a few hours on a final render and good lighting makes all the difference with a render.
I decided to do one of my recent renders with lighter hair as you thought the darker hair was the key to the success.
I left this overnght and I guess it took about5 hours judging by where it was when I went to bed.
just raytraced shadows with standard lights.
Thanks, but the real credit has to go to Futurebiscuit for building such an easy to use plugin.
Most of the hair I've made is pretty primitive - usually little more than curl and surface attract. This hair is no exception in that regard. The clump and tweak workspaces provide the texture quality but the real magic is in the shaders. The shader is a simple no nonsense set up that is easier to figure out and use than the much more complicated omni shaders - but it obviously has what's needed to get the job done.
Like all good things, it works on the KISS principle. :-)
Personally, I can't wait to see what the real hair masters do with this jewel.I can't wait until I get a machine that can run it. Still good work IMHO.
So deep shadows are basically depth map shadows with the ability to store multi depth values per pixel (and some other extra featues). Which is great for transparent 'volumetric' objects like hair and clouds. Deep shadows were actually developed for the fur in Monsters inc.
As they're basically just depth map shadow 3Delight can render them with the traditional REYES algorithm which is quick and has low memory usage for complex structures such as hair (especially with the custom optimisation Garibaldi does). Which means if you stick to lighting with deep shadows you can render even highly complex scenes with lots of hair on 32bit machines with only 2GB of RAM.
Traditionally if you were rendering a scene with hair/fur in a VFX situation you would use high resolution simple depth map shadows with your lights and not have your hair visible in that pass then do a additional localised lower res deep shadow pass with just your hair visible.
But as the following features of 3Delight are not available in the Daz interface or API as far as I know, so me mentioning this is kind of pointless:
* Simple depth map shadows.
* Ability to change shadow resolution to anything other than 1024x1024 pixels.
* Ability to have multiple shadow passes per light and link to objects.
On install of Version 14 we had an option to go the best options for our video cards or the Basic version of our Video cards...I selected best and I get crash galores even on old scene's...Sooo I am the lower class folks..
So How do I change this setting...I uninstalled the previous .14 version and I expected the menu to choose the video card options but it never came up again...Which .Dll do I delete to reset this option...?
Traditionally if you were rendering a scene with hair/fur in a VFX situation you would use high resolution simple depth map shadows with your lights and not have your hair visible in that pass then do a additional localised lower res deep shadow pass with just your hair visible.
But as the following features of 3Delight are not available in the Daz interface or API as far as I know, so me mentioning this is kind of pointless:
* Simple depth map shadows.
* Ability to change shadow resolution to anything other than 1024x1024 pixels.
* Ability to have multiple shadow passes per light and link to objects.
Ahhh Layers maybe...?Or as they say now render passes...?
I used the shader option for all of the modes in advanced section. I think it improved the appearance of the hair, so it looks more natural. It is not as uniform as with the deep shadow mask, but that image is with different lighting which is coming from more directions, and I'm not really sure the uniformity looks natural either.
The render time, however, went crazy. It was probably about 14 hours. I have the render quality settings cranked up higher than what I normally use, so the render time might be more manageable if I bring it back down to settings like I usually use.
Update: I added a setup image to show how I have the UberArea light planes placed. The UA light planes are parented to the cameras which are used to point the light planes at the subject. The camera between is used for renders.
All three look natural, however the two with the uberlight look like it was gelled/dirty. All three also have very fine hair quality. You might want to up the hair size slightly if that isn't the effect you were looking for. Any one of the three would pass as a real hairstyle though, just cleaner/dirtier or more natural/jelled versions of the same hair.
I've noticed that in general I tend to prefer the ones without uberlight, whereas the skin and most other things look better 'with' uberlight. So doing a multipass render and combining in post it seems is going to give the best results, unless someone has a way to automate the process.
I had an interesting thing happen two days ago...I rendered to a RIB and then rendered the result in the standalone 3Delight....and the hair color changed.
It should be red..