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Share Your Efforts and Experiences with the new Strand-Base Hair in DS

L'Adair

L'Adair

Enthusiast
I don't want to be presumptuous, but I hate seeing CWRW's product review thread getting taken over by conversations on Daz's new Strand-Base Hair feature. People are doing wonderful things with SBH, (Joe Pingleton comes immediately to mind,) and I want to see more of what they are doing.
 
Joe Pingleton

Joe Pingleton

Member
CWRW said:
Welcome, Joe! Please feel free to post here as I am just starting to try to get a handle on the new SBH after only fairly recently finally getting really comfortable with LAMH:) (figures.. I just get one thing learned and now have to learn something else new right away :-/

Your work is a lot better than mine so far on the SBH - but then I did just start messing with it yesterday:) I am really struggling with it making so many dark shadows, which get worse with more hair density etc, and I've been trying various lighting scenarios from good old SunSky to various HDRIs etc. I zapped the root darkness and all those settings to 0/everything is white based but still it never looks like your renders, especially your last cat one.

I for one welcome any suggestions you have and I will do the same as I learn. I have been following the thread over at Daz and picking up stuff from there as well as looking at the old Garbaldi documentation.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your kind words of encouragement and inspiration. I feel the same way, I have spent a lot of time learning LAMH (though I never got as good of results as you do) and was worried I wasted my time. I went through the same process with Carrara's hair before DAZ abandoned Carrara. The great thing is that the principles for creating hair are still the same and the new Strand Based Hair doesn't come with all the bugs of using LAMH. I never used the Garbaldi plugin so I don't know much about it.

I just started playing with Strand Based Hair in the latest beta and since there is no real documentation I have been making every mistake imaginable. I was getting so frustrated with my first experiments that I completely changed my approach. I decided to use information from the Wikipedia entry on fur to create a Down hair, Awn hair and Guard hair set of hairs, each with different hair style settings and densities. This allowed me to use a lot fewer hairs than my previous experiments and thus it requires fewer resources. Mother nature seems to know best.

In a nutshell, I use a density map to control the distribution of the hair (this seems to be the key to getting realistic hair coverage) and adjust the length using the "Reduce Length" slider under the "TWEAK" tab

I create a fluffy "Down" hair coat with lots of thin hairs curved and attracted to the body. Then I create an "Awn" hair coat that has about half as many hairs and has a wider and longer hair with some fuzziness and a slight curve to it. Lastly, I create a "Guard" hair coat that is about 1/6 the number of hairs of the "Down" coat and is slightly longer than the "awn" coat.

I was running into the same problems as you in having the fur turn out too dark and the whites not holding their values the more hair I put on the figure. So I went through and changed all the textures maps to be liter, this helped but was a pain to do for everything and only partially solved the problem. I recently discovered some settings that got better results and just used the original texture maps. Basically, I use texture maps on the "Transmission Color", "Hair Color", and "Hair Highlight" roots and tips. Then I change the "Highlight Weight", "Anisotropy" and "Anisotropy Rotation" to zero. (See the attached screenshot for my latest settings)

I am still working on the process but it seems to be getting a little better each experiment. I can provide more info if you would like to know more. It would be very interesting to see what someone who knows what they are doing thinks about this process or if they have a better method.
 

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CWRW

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Cool, Joe! Your info is very helpful- again quite a different process than LAMH. I did make some progress today on my little foal- again the styling is the same super quick/not very good but I am making some progress with the shader. I need to start playing with the density maps next- this is done really without any... (these renders are not fully baked)

FoalQuicktestBuckskinWed3.jpg
FoalQuicktestBuckskinWed2.jpg
 
Joe Pingleton

Joe Pingleton

Member
CWRW said:
Cool, Joe! Your info is very helpful- again quite a different process than LAMH. I did make some progress today on my little foal- again the styling is the same super quick/not very good but I am making some progress with the shader. I need to start playing with the density maps next- this is done really without any... (these renders are not fully baked)
Click to expand...
WOW this looks amazing. Hopefully, you are also a DAZ PA so that you can make a dForce Strand Based Hair version :)
 
CWRW

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Joe Pingleton said:
WOW this looks amazing. Hopefully, you are also a DAZ PA so that you can make a dForce Strand Based Hair version :)
Click to expand...

Thanks Joe! Well... no not now. I was a Daz PA from 2009-2013 but left to come here to work with Chris/develop our Harry. But I don't think this needs to be a dForce deal to work in this case. (An adult horse with a long mane and tail, yes...) I do need to sort out next how to package it in a non-dForce way. I do have some possible ideas I need to try.
 
L'Adair

L'Adair

Enthusiast
CWRW said:
Cool, Joe! Your info is very helpful- again quite a different process than LAMH. I did make some progress today on my little foal- again the styling is the same super quick/not very good but I am making some progress with the shader. I need to start playing with the density maps next- this is done really without any... (these renders are not fully baked)

View attachment 47665 View attachment 47666
Click to expand...

Well, I think these are wonderful as they are.
 
CWRW

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Cool, Joe!

I will go check it out and let you know if I have any problems with it.
 
CWRW

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Meanwhile I got playing with trying a long SBH mane and tail (which unfortunately will be basically useless without the dForce)- mainly an exercise in learning the tools some more etc. Gonna do more on it as I have some ideas to make it better, but here it is for now.

ArabLongManeSBH_T2.jpg
 
CWRW

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Dakorillon (IMArts) said:
I think for winter coats and shaggy donkeys and ponies that the SBH works fine as is.
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For their coats yes- not so much the manes and tails- one would need to re-style for every new pose, since the dForce won't be in effect. I have a rough of my foal coat done with SBH in my preview thread. The mane and tail I think could work well enough for the foal as they are short. I need to mess with it more/do better styling/test it etc.
 
CWRW

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
DanaTA said:
I find this odd, since I've seen several cases of people using dForce on older hairs with some success. Some of them looked quite good. No vendor tools required. I guess there's something I'm missing.

Dana
Click to expand...

Dana it might be me that's missing something. I've not used dForce at all so it very well may possible to do some other type of workaround. Obviously if I made this hair for market or freebie the end user would have to do their own dForcing/it wouldn't be a part of the product.
 
L'Adair

L'Adair

Enthusiast
DanaTA said:
I find this odd, since I've seen several cases of people using dForce on older hairs with some success. Some of them looked quite good. No vendor tools required. I guess there's something I'm missing.

Dana
Click to expand...

Hi, Dana.

Up until Daz released the beta with Strand-Based Hair and the ability to use, if not create, "dForce Hair," everything being "dForced" was using what Daz calls the dForce Cloth modifiers. (They've been using that terminology for quite some time, but until the dForce Hair was released, most of us just called it dForce.)

If you download the most recent dForce Starter Essentials, there are four example scenes with G8 and the Mohawk hair style. Each gender has a Strand-Based Hair version you can edit, and each gender has a dForce version you can simulate.

If you open one of the files with the dForce modified hair, you can see the dForce parameters in the Surfaces tab. These parameters are going to be a lot different than the parameters used for dForce Cloth. Beyond that, the dForce Hair modifiers were developed specifically for simulating stranded hair. I'm not in the loop, so I have no idea of the technology behind it. However, those who have bought and simulated dForce Hair say it simulates surprisingly fast. I also get the impression it doesn't really affect the render speed.

To use dForce Cloth on stranded hair, you have to convert it to polygons. Not sure whether that means an OBJ or if it will apply to fiber mesh, as I haven't tried it. Those who have say the high poly count makes for slow simulations, and iirc, for slower render speeds as well.

For something like a horse's mane and/or tail, using dForce Cloth may still be sufficient.
 
L'Adair

L'Adair

Enthusiast
CWRW said:
Thanks! I can do better though:) I honestly spent about 5 minutes styling/mainly wanted to see what tools did what. It doesn't look that great from other angles right now.
Click to expand...

Only five minutes! Sheesh.

It proves a point I made elsewhere, though. Anyone adept at LAMH is going to be way ahead of the learning curve on this.

The mane and tail you posted earlier today is positively amazing!
 
xmasrose

xmasrose

Eager
Joe Pingleton Thank you for sharing this is so generous of you! :thankyou2::wow:

Everything loads fine and seems to render fine (I have an older computer so it takes time). Looks great!

The thing that come to my mind to improve it is : for the cat head work on the direction the hair should go (to increase realism). For example on cats the hair goes from nose to forehead and on forehead up in a vertical way ; on the cheeks it goes in a horizontal way from right to left on the left side and from left to right on the right side .... Hope it makes sens ;)
 
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