Redistributing Poser Dynamic Hair without the base figure - a solution

[Cliff Bowman]

I've been working on "TrueHair" on and off for quite a while now as a personal pet project, because it felt like the Hair Room (like the Cloth Room) was restricting take-up of the Poser dyanmics.

I've got some of the harder aspects worked out... to the point where it feels like I should probably stop hogging the Big Cat thread where Chris and Laurie were showing the lion (we all love the lion, right? Hivewire Big Cat Has Begun!) . So here I'm showing the icons/thumbnails I've put together today to illustrate what the tool does. The icons I have not highlighted represent unfinished tools, so you can see this isn't ready for market yet.

It has been suggested I might make a "Merchant Resource" out of this. I'd love top guage interest in the project now that it actually works (it wasn't worth pushing much in 2007/2008 because it didn't work well enough then).

One of the guiding principles of this project is that it should avoid adding "User Interface" elements if at all possible. It's supposed to make loading and rendering Dynamic Hair easier, with a couple of helpers that will probably help make scenes lighter if the figure is in the distance. Tweaks, if you will.

I don't currently see how to complete the "CoverInFur" tool without introducing a dialogue box of some sort, but so far the rest should all apply pretty well just by double-clicking them, as if they were a pose, prop, conformer or material.

Any comments?

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[eclark1894]

I've been working on "TrueHair" on and off for quite a while now as a personal pet project, because it felt like the Hair Room (like the Cloth Room) was restricting take-up of the Poser dyanmics.

I've got some of the harder aspects worked out... to the point where it feels like I should probably stop hogging the Big Cat thread where Chris and Laurie were showing the lion (we all love the lion, right? Hivewire Big Cat Has Begun!) . So here I'm showing the icons/thumbnails I've put together today to illustrate what the tool does. The icons I have not highlighted represent unfinished tools, so you can see this isn't ready for market yet.

It has been suggested I might make a "Merchant Resource" out of this. I'd love top guage interest in the project now that it actually works (it wasn't worth pushing much in 2007/2008 because it didn't work well enough then).

One of the guiding principles of this project is that it should avoid adding "User Interface" elements if at all possible. It's supposed to make loading and rendering Dynamic Hair easier, with a couple of helpers that will probably help make scenes lighter if the figure is in the distance. Tweaks, if you will.

I don't currently see how to complete the "CoverInFur" tool without introducing a dialogue box of some sort, but so far the rest should all apply pretty well just by double-clicking them, as if they were a pose, prop, conformer or material.

Any comments?

Cheers,

Cliff

View attachment 32266

Minimize the window as much as possible and preferably keep it Floating. Once you click "okay" the window should go away. If you need it again, you should be able to just call it back.

 

[David]

First off, lots of hard work here. Congrats on the project so far.

I didn't follow the discussion in the Big Cat thread, so excuse me if this has already been asked. Does the 'hair' require a skull cap for growth area, or is it user defined? Wondering the same for 'Covered in fur', can the user define the hair growth areas or is it predetermined (covered in fur)?

This looks really useful. Depending on the level of control, would love to have this. I've got characters in mind that would benefit from a bit of fur here and there.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Hi David. My day job has just dumped some workload on me but I'll try and offer a quick answer and perhaps expand later.

No skull cap is required - the hair is directly on the figure. When starting from scratch that would be user defined Hair Groups.

Cover In Fur isn't written yet, you will probably have to tick what materials you want covered, or what body parts, in a list. UI basically hasn't been started for this one as I try to figure out how to keep it as minimal as possible. I currently expect it to define hair groups based on materials.

The "Save" capability is already there, as is "Load" - the two most important IMO. The "Cover In Fur" is more of a whim because when I want to put hair on something it is rarely human.

Because the tools don't use "skull caps" of any sort, if the target figure uses the same mesh (vertex numbers, order, and grouping - including group names) then it doesn't have to be the same as the originating figure.

For example - I was going to test putting hair on Dawn, saving it, and loading it on Dusk - but real-world work has got to me just as I was about to download Dusk

Hope that helps. The idea is to make it easier for people to use Dynamic Hair that others - like Laurie - have designed, but with a few add-ons meant to make it easier to tweak hair a bit, and to provide a STARTING point (the Cover In Fur should provide a good starting point - see the mouse - but not necessarily a good final hair!).

Oh yeah - the Materials icon. You could have one for each texture set for the whole body (black, white, ginger, tabby, whatever) and it loads the texture onto every bit of dynamic hair across the whole figure.

Hope that helps - now I've got a Gremlin to shoot down for a customer,

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[eclark1894]

Be really nice if there were some way to make the hair look wet and soaked. for renders of people in tubs, pools and showers. wet furry animals, etc.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

It should be possible to make hair "droop" a bit - making it glossy should be down to material adjustments. There's a couple of things I could try, but here I've used Poser's ability to "drape" the hair a bit. Just to respond quickly

Cheers,

Cliff

(no - I do NOT enjoy my day job as much as this. Which can make doing the day job so much harder!).

 

[Satira Capriccio]

I so hear you on the day job!

We do have retirement to look forward to. One day.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Here's a quick 3-group hair thrown together for Dusk - and sadly (or possibly luckily for Dawn given the quality of that hair!) Dusk and Dawn meshes are different enough that this type of hair is not transferrable between them (at least, not now - probably not ever).

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Glitterati3D]

Wow, Cliff! Very exciting stuff. And, while the figure hair for Dawn and Dusk looks like fun, I would use animals more if I had a simple hair system like you are talking about. I'd love to see real hair on the Hivewire horse! Wow, wouldn't that just make him all the more special!

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Simplicity is key, as far as I'm concerned. I don't aim to duplicate everything the Hair Room can do - to my mind that would be pointless. But I would love to make it more PRACTICAL to distribute hair/fur with restrictions removed - so, no having to include the figure with the hair is the first core principle. Next is not having pop-up boxes. That's trickier, and a rule I am fairly certain to have to break for adding hair/fur to creatures that I have not seen yet. But while I'm making it easier to simply LOAD a hair set that someone has designed, it seems to me that it's an ideal opportunity to make tweaking dynamic hair simpler, easier, more obvious. Maybe easier enough that I can create hair on a human, even, one day?

Horses? Until you get close up it looks to me from renders like Harry looks superb as-is. But closer-up, yeah - there could be room for Dynamic Hair to make a big difference.

I've got to avoid overcomplicating things by adding too many icons (I'm just about to add "TipWidth" plus and minus, I think, and I'm strongly considering a "Drape The Hair" button and and... whoa boy!).

Cheers,

Cliff

Oh! I wonder if a Shetland Pony would be possible?

 

[eclark1894]

Maybe you should take a look at the Blender strand hair controls. I wish I knew more about Python. Blender is both opensource and Python based.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

That sounds more like writing a new hair solution than trying to make it easier to distribute and tweak Poser's dynamic hair! Probably a LITTLE beyond me right now

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Glitterati3D]

Oh! I wonder if a Shetland Pony would be possible?

Not only possible, already done: HiveWire Shetland Pony - A HiveWire 3D Creation by CGCubed, Christopher Creek Art, and CWRW

 

[Rae134]

Yes, we need fuzzy Harry! Especially if trying to recreate a draft or pony.

And how dapper would he look with a Mo as well

 

[StudioMartillo]

Wow! Fantastic renders.
You can do that in Poser!?
lol ... Just horsing around.

I put fur on a mouse once.

He didn't like it.

Before you go putting fur on creatures, you should consider how they would feel about it.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

You should ALWAYS consider the feelings of others before you add or remove clothing of any sort. The first time I remember using Poser's dynamic hair was back when Poser 5 was released. Still one of my favourite hair renders

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Many, MANY of the things that I do start off with some kind of negativity - some kind of challenge. For example, the bit of work that brought me to DAZ's attention was some Walk Cycles that I did in response to Dave-So's comments about Kim Goosen's "The Girl" figure which, IIRC, compared her to something like a frog on crack (alas, the old forums are long gone so it's kinda hard to check the exact phrasing).

The "Blue Man" image circa 2004 (based on file date) was, IIRC, in response to someone saying that Poser Dynamic Hair couldn't be used to cover an entire figure. And this whole "TrueHair" project came about from the assumption that you can't distribute Poser Dynamic Hair without using a prop or including the figure that the hair is based on.

To be honest - my day job is pretty much the result of being told at school that I couldn't take computer class, because the computers had been bought (and the curriculum devised) for the year below me and down. NATURALLY I had to get in to computers!

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[StudioMartillo]

I wrote Python scripts to do it. It takes two scripts, on to package the hair, and one to unpack it.
It puts all the HairRoom data and Hair groups in a Prop, in the Custom Data section, and then adds a 'run script' command at the end which invokes the 'unpack' script which moves all the stuff in Custom Data, out to Dictionaries and rebuilds the hair. Materials and all.
You have to use the correct figure of course.

 

[StudioMartillo]

Here it is. The hair/fur has to be done already. This trick just makes it possible to package it.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Of course. Am I just re-treading ground here? Are your scripts available somewhere?

Cheers,

Cliff

PS Edit to add - looks like it is! Oh well. May have to reconsider then