CWRW Product Previews

[Lyne]

After hours and many breaks ... I finally got fur I'm almost satisfied with. I'm not sure whether I need higher density or shorter hair.

I've never had a lot of success with the styling options, so tend to control the hair with a combination of the back, down, side and gravity settings. The strongest gravity setting on any of the hair groups is a -0.5 on the legs, with -0.2 on the body, and 0 on the head fur.

Tsuki was considerate enough that she allowed me to study her to realize the hair on her ears and face are much shorter than that on her body.
What's really needed though are two hair groups per body part ... one shorter and denser, and a second that's not as dense, but longer.

Did I mention this was Poser?

View attachment 28387

OHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! Will you sell it to me, I mean us?!?!?!? oooooo!!!! (said by person who does NOT want to tackle DS with MY brain dysfunctions)

 

[Miss B]

After hours and many breaks ... I finally got fur I'm almost satisfied with. I'm not sure whether I need higher density or shorter hair.

WHOA!!! Satira, you ARE my hero!!! I can't wait to try this out.

 

[JOdel]

Thanks Ram and Laurie. I like your panther body hair too.

For the Housecat, I set the head hair to grow upwards and rather than down and reduced the length. The longest hair was on the abdomen and chest, which was 0.0750, getting shorter on chest2 and up the neck to the head.

Of course, Tsuki is short haired, and since I was using her as my model, I went short, short, short.

View attachment 28390


After reading as much info as I could find on Poser Hair, I've found ignoring the instructions and fiddling with the gravity gives me far better results than trying to style the hair. Sometimes, I use absolutely no gravity at all. After all, if I'm doing a hairstyle that's supposed to stand up or be combed back, gravity rather defeats the objective.

It's also rare I can get a long hair style that is acceptable to me. This is one that I liked. I wanted the hair to be rather frizzy and a bit wild ... and I think I succeeded.
If I remember correctly, I tilted the figure backwards during the simulation of the hair groups.

View attachment 28391

How very Pre-Raphaelite. Impressive.

 

[Sunfire]

Satira that's some very lovely fur on that cat, and that it was the Poser hair room is just absolutely wonderful! It's all about patience, of which I have a very low supply of.

 

[Miss B]

Satira that's some very lovely fur on that cat, and that it was the Poser hair room is just absolutely wonderful! It's all about patience, of which I have a very low supply of.

Welcome to the club. There are times I can't deal with my lack of patience.

 

[Dreamer]

@Satira Capriccio WOW! Love it! I was playing with the hair room the other night and just about lost all my own hair let alone getting any on the cat lol
Please please say you will share/sell this to us

 

[Miss B]

Ohhh, a nice tutorial would be wonderful! ~hint, hint, hint~

 

[NapalmArsenal]

Thanks Ram and Laurie. I like your panther body hair too.

For the Housecat, I set the head hair to grow upwards and rather than down and reduced the length. The longest hair was on the abdomen and chest, which was 0.0750, getting shorter on chest2 and up the neck to the head.

Of course, Tsuki is short haired, and since I was using her as my model, I went short, short, short.

View attachment 28390


After reading as much info as I could find on Poser Hair, I've found ignoring the instructions and fiddling with the gravity gives me far better results than trying to style the hair. Sometimes, I use absolutely no gravity at all. After all, if I'm doing a hairstyle that's supposed to stand up or be combed back, gravity rather defeats the objective.

It's also rare I can get a long hair style that is acceptable to me. This is one that I liked. I wanted the hair to be rather frizzy and a bit wild ... and I think I succeeded.
If I remember correctly, I tilted the figure backwards during the simulation of the hair groups.

View attachment 28391

You know that setting would totally rock the Lion mane!!

 

[Satira Capriccio]

Thanks everyone!

If I understand what I've read about saving Poser hair for reuse or to allow others to use it, the obj has to be saved with the hair. With human hair you can easily create a skullcap and save the hair with that obj. So, if this gets to a point where I feel it can be used by others, it would need to be sold through HiveWire. I'm not opposed to that at all.

If I feel this isn't something I can do, I'll certainly share how I've gone about doing it. Sound ok?

Now, if Tiny expresses interest in creating a furry Housecat, I'll bow out to her. She's got the experience with furry animals I don't have.

 

[Miss B]

Either way you decide to go Satira, is fine by me.

 

[StudioMartillo]

Oh that cat you furred up Satira, gives me hope.
Just recently been playing in the hair room and the results aren't very good so far.
What is confusing me is that when hair groups are on a poly they seem to be mapped to the UV position of the poly,
but applying the original, or modified original texture seems to result in some slop, or offset.
And the strangest things seem to happen to the speculars.
A real tough one is deselecting the polys right around the eyes, so hair won't grow in the eyes.
Usually there's a whole bunch of really small ones there and getting the camera around to have access to them is very hard.
Well, I should look at the Poser Tutorials Manual. And I'll have to practice a LOT to get fur THAT good.

 

[Satira Capriccio]

For the head, especially around the eyes, I found it easier to pick the polys to add to the group rather than to add them all then remove the ones I don't want. Also, it helps to hide everything but the group you are working on. That way you don't accidently add things like teeth, tongue, eyes, etc.

 

[StudioMartillo]

Ah, thanks for that. I took a kind of bulk approach using the add button and putting the whole figure poly group in, and then used the subtract button to try and take out the surfaces I didn't want. But the surface list always shows all surfaces.
It wasn't hard to remove the polys on the nose, but around the eyes... sheeesh
It's a tuffy anyhow. But fun.
I WANT FUR!
Just look at me, nearly naked!

 

[StudioMartillo]

@Satira Capriccio
I discovered another thing that I was missing. The Gravity. Now I see what you are saying about the settings.
What I failed to do however was click the calculate button.
That's what bends the guide hairs and makes the fur look so much better.
In your post about the long hair, where you were talking about tilting the character back I was..
HUH? OK , some progress. Lots to learn yet, but thank you so much for the inspiration.

 

[RAMWolff]

Thanks everyone!

If I understand what I've read about saving Poser hair for reuse or to allow others to use it, the obj has to be saved with the hair. With human hair you can easily create a skullcap and save the hair with that obj. So, if this gets to a point where I feel it can be used by others, it would need to be sold through HiveWire. I'm not opposed to that at all.

If I feel this isn't something I can do, I'll certainly share how I've gone about doing it. Sound ok?

Now, if Tiny expresses interest in creating a furry Housecat, I'll bow out to her. She's got the experience with furry animals I don't have.

There is more than enough room for preset creators. Your technique and Tiny's are going to be different and appeal to to different folks for different needs. I think your preset is VERY realistic looking so I'd not bow out if I were you. Also I thought you could save the hair room presets to sell or share? I'm sure there must be a way rather than saving out the created obj info.

 

[Satira Capriccio]

Since gravity pulls the hair down (or up if you use positive numbers instead of negative), tilting the figure affects how gravity affects the hair.

For example, if you're using Dawn, and she's upright, gravity pulls the hair straight down. If you haven't got the collision working (which I still can't get it to work right), the hair will often end up buried in her shoulder and back. But if you tilt Dawn back like 45 degrees (or even more), straight down now results in the hair missing her shoulder and back. When finished with the simulation, change the xRotate back to 0 and ... voila. You have results like I had with Miranda.

@Satira Capriccio
I discovered another thing that I was missing. The Gravity. Now I see what you are saying about the settings.
What I failed to do however was click the calculate button.
That's what bends the guide hairs and makes the fur look so much better.
In your post about the long hair, where you were talking about tilting the character back I was..
HUH? OK , some progress. Lots to learn yet, but thank you so much for the inspiration.

Thanks RAM.

I may have corrupted the scene file now. So, I recreated the furry cat in another file. But then Poser crashed just as I was finishing the hair groups. Though hopefully, if I reboot the computer, maybe I'll be able to load both file and continue working on them.

According to the Poser manual, strand based prop hair has to be saved along with the underlying geometry. So when saving it to the library, you need to include the prop the hair is grown from. If using a skullcap to grow the hair, then you'd save the skullcap. But if you grew the hair directly from the figure's head, you'd need to include the head.

Mind you ... one could always create a cat bodysuit and then grow the hair from the bodysuit instead of the cat. I've actually done that where I posed the animal first, then exported the obj, merged the mesh, created new material zones, and then imported that new obj. But that's only works for personal use.

There is more than enough room for preset creators. Your technique and Tiny's are going to be different and appeal to to different folks for different needs. I think your preset is VERY realistic looking so I'd not bow out if I were you. Also I thought you could save the hair room presets to sell or share? I'm sure there must be a way rather than saving out the created obj info.

 

[Dreamer]

According to the Poser manual, strand based prop hair has to be saved along with the underlying geometry. So when saving it to the library, you need to include the prop the hair is grown from. If using a skullcap to grow the hair, then you'd save the skullcap. But if you grew the hair directly from the figure's head, you'd need to include the head.

Mind you ... one could always create a cat bodysuit and then grow the hair from the bodysuit instead of the cat. I've actually done that where I posed the animal first, then exported the obj, merged the mesh, created new material zones, and then imported that new obj. But that's only works for personal use.

It should be possible to set the file up so it calls the original cat .obj rather than having it embedded in the hair file. That we if some one doesn't have the cat the hair just wont work

 

[Sunfire]

RTE encoding, it's what Tiny does with her files.

 

[StudioMartillo]

If RTEncoder is still available that's probably a good thing.
While playing in Poser's hair room I found that it generates PROPS.
It calls them hairProps and adds them to the character.
It adds two 'actors' with that name for each hair group, one with the prop custom geometry, and the other with all the normal params and texture nodes.
Then it adds the hair groups that have all the hair growth and dynamics parameters, and refer to the hairProps.
When you save just those hairProps the hair groups go with them.
But all this is for naught because without the CHARACTER the hairs do nothing useful.
What I want to do is use Python to export my hair room info and import it when I want to get a good hair design set up real quick when making some new hair.
Pretty tricky to get the right concept, but I've been making some progress.
I'll also try to write some scripts that can put the hairProp together with the character, but it looks like it will have to modify the .cr2 file itself. Probably if the script copies the .cr2 with a new name, like furrycat.cr2 and mods that one it won't cause any loss.
I love this kind of stuff.

 

[Dreamer]

RTE encoding, it's what Tiny does with her files.

Did she do that with the Gorilla? I don't have it but saw no mention of it needing RTE on the product page while the fluffy cat, (that I do have), does mention it