OctaneRender 2.x Fur/Hair support

[panton41]

I saw that a specialized fur primitive is available in OctaneRender 2.0, but how does this translate to using it with the Poser plug-in. I'd like to use it for a grass plain or for fur on a figure but there seems to be no support for this nor even the most basic documentation on how to use it (even in the standalone version).

For headliner feature on a program that costs half a grand I'd certainly expect better documentation than totally non-existent.

[FooZe]

Hi Panton,

Please see here for Poser hair info: http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Poser/?page_id=298
And here for info about the standalone hair: http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Standalo ... age_id=179
For the standalone, Hair can only be imported via Alembic, so your 3d host app needs to be able to export hair via alembic.

[face_off]

I'd like to use it for a grass plain or for fur on a figure but there seems to be no support for this nor even the most basic documentation on how to use it (even in the standalone version).

The Poser plugin converts Poser dynamic hair strands to Octane hair strands. For grass, you would "grow" Poser hair on a plane, and simply render in the plugin. You can test this yourself with the demo version of the plugin at http://render.otoy.com/downloads.php. In general, if you have hundreds of thousands of hair strands, you will need a reasonably good graphics card to render at speed.

Paul

[panton41]

Neither of those links address my issue in any way, shape or form and pretty much ignore the actual content of my post.

There was a feature, listed under a bullet point, in the marketing copy for Octane 2.0 for a fur/hair primitive.

Hair and fur – An optimized hair render primitive is now available to allow rendering of hair or fur while reducing memory usage by 20 times compared to previous processes. OctaneRender™ 2 also simulates the distribution and fluidity of movement of those primitives.

It showed what looked like a sphere covered in a fine fur.



This is what I want, not directions on how to export from Poser's Hair Room. I don't want to export from Poser's Hair Room. I don't have a clue on how to use Poser's Hair Room and I've spent untold hours trying to figure it out. Not to mention it is extreme overkill when all you want is procedurally generated fur to put on a cat.

This is functionality I paid half a grand for and I kind of expected to be able to do. There is zero documentation anywhere on this site or any of the other sites that Google catalogs (in other words the entire public-facing Internet) saying how to do this, even in the stand-alone version of Octane. It might as well not exist as far as I can tell.

[face_off]

I think you have confused the Octane fur primitive with a fur SHADER. A fur shader (or material) will generate the hair strands on-the-fly on a surface. But the Octane fur primitive is effectively a 3d tube which follows the path of a list of vertices - which (in Poser's case) come from the Poser Hair Room. So to render fur on an animal, or grass of a ground plane, grow the fur/grass in the Poser Hair Room, and then render in the plugin.

Paul

[panton41]

So I have to potentially wrangle two or three dozen separate zones on a model, some of them very tiny and fiddly, manually, in an agonizingly repeatedly dull process with among the worst tools I have ever had the misfortune of using (in the Poser Hair Room), to cover a model in Poser's version of hair. Sculpt two or three dozen different regions of hair that cannot interact with each other mathematically so that it leaves seams at the joints where the hair falls wrong. And then export it to Octane for it to cover the model with its internal fur/hair primitive that tries its best to match the dumpster fire that is using Poser's Hair Room for fur?

[face_off]

If you want to cover the model in one hit - export the figure as OBJ (tick Weld, untick all other options), the re-import the OBJ and the figure will be a single prop which you can apply apply hair to in the Hair Room in one go. The ability of any 3d app to "grow" hair on geometry relies on the topology of the base mesh - and Poser figures are comprised of separate meshes for each body part - so there will be seams resulting from this. Growing grass will not have this issue - you can simply add a hires plane, morph or bend it with the morph tool or magnets, and then grow grass on it in the Hair Room.

Paul

[panton41]

It's nothing against Octane, if that's how it works that's how it works, my frustration is aimed at Poser for having the overly complicated Hair Room when what I'm wanting to do is apply fur to a model with little more difficulty than applying a shader. I can see why I've never seen a hobbyist 3d artist make a furry character with actual 3d modelled fur.

I'd love to have a procedural fur generator that follows a texture like a displacement map to control the length of the generated fur over the figure. Then again maybe that's the purpose of a sufficiently complicated displacement map.

[face_off]

I'd love to have a procedural fur generator that follows a texture like a displacement map to control the length of the generated fur over the figure. Then again maybe that's the purpose of a sufficiently complicated displacement map.

I have implement this in the ArchiCAD plugin (for generating grass), and IMO, the Poser Hair Room is a much better solution. The "Grass Shader" concept in the ArchiCAD plugin requires the pre-calculation of grass strands (stored in Alembic format), and provides only very limited tools to control the grass width, height and randomness. Whereas the Poser Hair Room (whilst a handful to master) offers far greater ability to get the fur/grass to look as you want.

Paul

[Witpapier]

If I may be so bold..... have you tried Zbrush? GoZ works good for the import export and fibermesh hair in Zbrush does the trick quite well.