I've been playing with some ideas for supporting the Poser Hair Room with Python scripts.
I'm really getting jealous of the LAMH stuff. WOW!
Well, some of the things that I've learned are:
When saving the dynamic hair made in the Hair Room each of the Hair Groups has to be saved seperately, and should be saved as .hr2s in the Hair Library. That way the features are preserved.
Although it is neccesary to save the body part that the Hair Group is attached to, with the hair, poser is NOT saving the base figure's obj file because the Hair Room creates custom geometry for the hairProp. This is what get's saved in the .hr2 file. Even though it looks like the body part is being selected.
When the .hr2 Hair Prop(s) is added to a new instance of the figure it was made for, the custom geometry that was saved with it is added to, or replaces the body part.
The base name for the custom geometry has to be the same as the orginal group it was made from or the hairProp will not respond to the rigging. Not good.
When adding something like fur, and almost every body part gets replaced with custom geometries, they don't get welded. So then the figure's fur isn't nicely pose-able. This is the discouraging part of that approach.
If I'm understanding Tiny's approach, the completed character is saved and secured with a utility that requires ownership of the original in order to be used. Seems like a much better way to do it.
But even when I save a furred up critter as a new character for my own use, and to preserve my fur design, the hair still needs adustment when the figure is loaded in a new scene and the pose is changed. That's the nature of the dynamics. And since their are probably a whole bunch of hairProps it's just a bit tedious.
So at first I was trying to take the simple approach of automating the process of saving out the .hr2s and reloading them when the entire fur would be used.
Only this doesn't help that much.
Now I'm looking at a Hair Room helper approach and the tough part about this is finding the Python objects that support the various palettes. The elusive one is the Group Editor palette, the hairProp does nothing without a polygon group. The Hair Room support is otherwise sufficient it seems.
And the next kicker is working out a way to build a hierarchy tree in the support script so the variations in hair length can be pre-calculated. It's not hard to make lists of lists in Python. The hard part is to support a variety of figures, with their slight differences in limb naming, such as foot/paw etc.
I've learned some things from SatiraCapriccio about how fur length should vary. Like much shorter fur on the head than on the belly. I have almost no fur at all so mine is not a good example.
Haven't made a lot of progress yet but if anyone has suggestions or advise it would be much appreciated.
This might not work. Hard to say for sure yet, but putting some heads together might result in making it easier to at least get something a bit like LAMH.
I hear a lot of Poser users clamouring for it.
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