Redistributing Poser Dynamic Hair without the base figure - a solution

[Cliff Bowman]

Hey Cliff, maybe it would be easier for you to create a library of groups in whatever figure is being used and ask the user to select those groups which should be ignored.

A friend of mine is doing the same for the handles on ProjectE - to exclude handles from a cloth sim.

I've got some thoughts on how I might add an interface to TrueHair, but - as with the parametric functions that I have given in and written - I am resistant. It's not, however, impossible to do afterwards - and I have wondered if it might be fun to to on-forum after release. Because I quite enjoy a bit of back-and-forth.

Here we can see that I folded and produced versions of the functions that can accept input in a fairly mundane way with minimum effort on my part. The way TrueHair is constructed these could have been done on-forum after release, but a lot of folk would miss it by not being on the forum. Obviously, I need to put together a couple more thumbnail images for functions that have none yet.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Ears might actually be a horse of a different color. Do the ears have to have fur on the inside or just the outside ? Seems to me the inner ear should be hairless. But that's just me talking.

Ears ARE a bone of contention, as it were. They are currently "ignored" both by "bone" name and my materials - but of course different critters by different artists tend to have been designed with different ideas. For example, neither cats nor dogs tend to have a "nose" bone or a "wet nose" material zone to key on. I'd love it if the dogs and cats had separate "pad" materials on their feet (you can't see it, by my quick House Cat hair has fur on his/her paw pads - that would need improving before it could be used seriously rather than just as a test).

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Looks like you might need to exclude the claws in that cover with hair, Laurie.

Actually, it may not be apparent there but the claws are already excluded thanks to them using the materials "01_ClawsBack" and "01_ClawsFront".

The ears are more of an issue in some respects though, because rEar and lEar use the material "01_FurEars" for both the outside (furry) AND the inside (skin) of the ears. That's going to take a human being to separate out and produce a preset for, using the same techniques as I did for the House Cat tutorial.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

On working on various critters, both to test and in writing the documentation, it has become obvious that one of the outstanding issues is that the hair gets in the way. A lot. It's hard to select an appropriate limb (for example) when there is masses of hair in the way. So today I've added an "InVisible" toggle (named that way to keep it well separate from the "InvisibleInRaytracing Toggle" function). It just flips the "Visible" property for all the hair across the figure.

I've also been reminded in doing this that I need to install Paint Shop Pro - so I'll break for lunch now and hopefully install PSP after lunch so I can put together some of the missing thumbnails.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

OK, PSP is installed on the new PC and the "Invisible Toggle" thumb is designed, along with a few others for new "parametric" functions - despite the Real World wanting me to do my day job. Next up is documenting "Invisible Toggle" and then back to the general manual writing.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

OK, so - PC problems have arisen again today. Not on MY new main desktop PC, but still fixing it will be an unwelcome distraction. I'd rather be using Poser.

As I'll have distraction issues badly for a while, I think I'll render and post a few images. It's probably apparent that I am hoping to supply some TrueHair "presets" either within TrueHair or as a separate product. These should act as a good starting point for more sophisticated render-worthy designs - a step up from "!CoverInHair".

We've also been tinkering with hair materials for SuperFly.

To illustrate - here's Dusk's current facial hair Presets using default Poser 11 lighting rendered in both Firefly:

and SuperFly:

I hope that you can see that the colour seems somewhat different, even though the lighting is the same. So. My son and I have been working on some materials to try and improve on the consistency of the look. We aren't finished yet, but I'll try and post some comparison images in-between working on the corrupt PC hard drive (on PC called "Neptune") and customer calls.

 

[Satira Capriccio]

That's going to be cool!

 

[Cliff Bowman]

I'm hoping to work on the HW BigDog preset today, but we'll have to see how much "real work" I have to do. I hope at least to put together some "masks" for areas that should not get fur despite the material names (like the inner ears, and the nose, possibly the paw pads).

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Varnayrah]

Wow, that sounds like a great tool for the hair room! I have a fairly decent (for personal use) haired HW House cat, but when it gets to editing any setting or wishing for another furried animal ... I confes I shrink from the work of covering so many body parts in fur. I'm very much looking forward to this! Great Work, Cliff!

 

[Cliff Bowman]

My PC Neptune is now back up and running having restored to 24 Feb status. So there's a bunch of updates to do, and I may have to redo synch folders and/or data backups.

I have been taking a long time over this - so it's probably worth showing the current workflow for a new creature. Let's use the dog as I haven't got a dog preset yet, shall we?

Here's how the dog loads (if you posed the ears awkwardly).

And here's how it looks after running "!CoverInHair".

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Run my "Length-" a few times. One time...

Two times...

Three times...

Four times...

Obviously, sonme dogs need longer hair and some need shorter. You can also set all the hair across the whole body to a specific value using one of the parametric functions rather than pressing Length+ and Length- until it "looks about right".

 

[Cliff Bowman]

There is, as many of you will know, some hard work next creating different groups manually to exclude items that we don't want hair on or that we want a different length of hair. For example, I have started working on:

A group behind the eyes, to stop hair from growing into the skull and eyeballs:

(you can just make out some red lines behind the eyes if you look closely)

A group around the eyes, potentially for shorter hair so the dog can SEE!

A group for the nose.

I'll also have to work on the paw pads and inner ears, but I have not finished the nose yet so have not started on the inner ears, pads, and toes.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Run the parametric function "SaveTrueHairPicker" and save the project to an available Pose folder:

Select that pose folder and press the "Refresh" icon to show the newly created TrueHair preset.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Hmmm... Neptune has not finished causing me grief, apparently

this process has created a .pz2, a .py, and a bunch of .TH files that comprise the trueHair preset. These can be freely distributed without the figure...

Let's start a new scene and set up another version of the same creature (in the case the HiveWire Big Dog).

and load the newly created Preset! Obviously, the various hand-defined masks and suchlike cannot be shown here as I have not actually created them yet.

Also, we have used a bare minimum of the TrueHair functions... there's a bunch of others to help in using the often troublesome Poser Dynamic Hair capability. The hair probably wants a whole bunch of improvements before it could be considered "good enough" to be a BASE preset.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Oh yeah - we don't have to manually remove hair from the tongue, teeth, gums, eyes, claws/toenails etc. because !CoverInHair didn't put hair on those in the first place.

However, you can see from this render how important it will be to exclude the nose and areas around the eyes manually.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Glitterati3D]

I was playing with the dog last night and tried and tried to group his nose to get rid of the hair and failed repeatedly. I'm just not very good with the grouping tool.

Poor puppy with a hairy nose.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

I'm working on a dog preset today that should help. Please forgive the dodgy material and the lack of a scene etc., but you can see that the nose is well along now and I have yet to touch the ears or the paws.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

A little tweaking does wonders. I hope to work on the ears next, then on to the paws.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Satira Capriccio]

Dodgy? Are you kidding? We don't expect perfection in WIPs!!!

This is so going to be worth it when you are done beating everything into submission!

 

[Miss B]

I couldn't agree more.