Hair Farm + octane Tweet

[ch0pper]

Quick question Paul because I don't know who to speak to in octane development to trying get this ball rolling.

My every ending quest to get hair perfect within poser + octane I have been in contact with hair farm manufacturers Cyber Radiance LLC http://www.hair-farm.com/

It looks like I'm going to buy the product plus + a licence with 3-D studio octane.

Please bear with me as this post would be kind of long. (This is what I initially wrote to them)


I fully understand that hair farm runs on the platform of 3-D studio Max

I wondered if you support octane render by http://render.otoy.com/?

As obviously the product is quite expensive and I don't want to buy a licence
to find out that it doesn't work. (As I'm not a big company I'm just a hobbyist really)


My current setup is poser pro 2014 with octane render plug-in.

I'm wondering if I can make hair in 3-D studio Max? There may be exported out as an object?

I've enclosed some basic renders that I've worked on. But as you can see the hair is quite lacking.

Anyway if you could get back to me regarding this I would be gratefully appreciated



Their answer was



Thank you for your interest in Hair Farm. Your character work is really impressive. It seems like you would certainly benefit from a powerful hair tool like Hair Farm.

Octane does not have direct support for Hair Farm, but you can export hair data from Hair Farm as a spline object or poly object and render using octane. In particular, you can use one of the hair conversion (HairTo) modifiers (HairTo Splines), HairTo Poly, HairTo PolyStrips, or HairTo Instances) or utilities (Hair to Spline Object or Hair to Poly Object). All of these would convert hair strands to a standard object format of 3ds Max, so you can use any tool to export the data..

Also, you can contact octane developers and ask them to provide support for Hair Farm. We have an SDK for renderer developers and it should be quite easy for them to support Hair Farm. This is indeed how V-Ray and Maxwell Render supports Hair Farm.

Best Regards,
Cem Yuksel[/color]








Who in the octane development team on octane 3-D studio Max should I contact regarding this do you have any name I could. Contact regarding this? Or maybe you could ask for me?


I would really appreciate this I know you're busy man I know you have many projects on the go.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

with thanks

[face_off]

Stunning hair!

I am by no means an expert in this area.....the 3 hair options are transmap (supported by Poser and Octane), polygon (generated by ZB and importable by Poser and supported by Octane), and splines (Poser strand hair) - not supported by Poser.

I have started (and got far enough to know it's not trivial to implement) making a python script to generate polygon hair from strand hair. This would mean Poser dynamic hair would be supported by the Octane plugin. One issue with this is that there would be one polygon hair strand for each Poser dynamic hair strand - so you would need a lot of dynamic hair strands to get the right effect. And it would still probably not be as good as what you've posted from Hair Farm.

Support for Hair Farm can either be by converting their splines into polygons (similar to what I'm trying to do with python above), which should in theory be supported by Octane currently OR natively support spline/strand hair in Octane via their API. The former is the easy solution, since Octane can render the polygons generated by HairToPoly or HairToPolyStrips currently. The later has been requested on these forums before (request to support stand hair - not support for Hair Farm).

So in summary - it would be worth trying HairToPoly (which I am guessing would be similar to ZB fibre hair) or HairToPolyStrips, and if they are not good enough, contact Otoy to suggest natively supporting Hair Farm. Posting in the General forums will most likely get the attention of Otoy.

Given Hair Farm only works in 3ds Max, it's something that the 3ds max Octane plugin would need to support - not the Poser plugin.

Hope that helps. I'll be interested to see where this leads.

Paul

[ch0pper]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCgWMIYGbV8&list=PLDh97J7dWPv6B889QK96vboc9ZP-xiWZe&feature=player_detailpage[/youtube]


While I was researching hair farm and various methods of hair that now seems to come and obsession with myself. I came across this quite amazing video which is integrated into 3-D packages which I'm sure it will be at some point.
Will be the next gen of hair generators.

the white paper is here on PDF
http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Luo_20 ... e-hair.pdf




Yes I plan to buy hair farm this coming week when I get paid. So I shall keep you updated Paul regarding my finds. I'm sure there's a few other people on the form that would be equally be interested in my findings regarding how hair farm

[ch0pper]

Well I managed to buy hair farm & 3-D studio Max+ plus octane render license the 3-D studio a Max also.

This was my first render with hair farm (rendered in normal scanline in 3-D studio Max)

It looks like it is going to be possible to export it to poser.

I will post my findings later this weekend a Sunday is really only time I can dedicate to this project

[ch0pper]

Well here are my tests and literally have been playing with this less than 24 hours

Exported the mesh from 3-D studio Max hair farm into an object file format(I have enclosed this so you can play with it yourselves if you wish)

You will need to do two things to do read this

You will need to reduce the size of the object to approximately 20% within poser

You would need to mirror the half of their hair to make a full hair. (As I haven't had time to work out how I actually joined to objects together in is hair farm may be later)



you can download the obj from my server if you wish to play with the test hair

send me a PM here ! and will send you the link


literally the render below is 30 minutes I didn't leave the rendered to complete it probably would be a lot better. Still a lot of shading and SSS to be done to get it perfect.

Also I slapped the object on the hair without any real care so I know the seems on the hair don't actually match but is a test it works that's all I care.

[face_off]

Looking good - how many polygons in that hair when it is in Octane?

[ch0pper]

let me check



is that 3.36 million?

[face_off]

Yes, 3.3 million polys. My guess is that the hair would be around 3 million of that 3.3 million polys.

Paul

[ch0pper]

Just an update on where I am with hair farm and outputting it to poser I've had some great results.
This is a very early stage mock up I will post another full-blown picture at the weekend.

But I'm now starting get the colouration and the hair that I wanted


Click on the below picture for blow up version

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

[face_off]

Amazing!