Hair set up

[bpzen]

Hi guys, I am 99% DAZ user now Poser I have not opened for almost a month after using it for 2.5 years.

Anyway, is there a good tutorial on how to get hair to look decent? I have a solid hair prop with nice trans maps and even disp maps, it looks like a clump if i simply use the auto materials, i been tryign to reverse engineer teh hair i had lookign nice with the poser plug in but no luck so far, any good tutorials, screen shots or docs I can have a look at?

thanks!

[itou31]

Hi,

Realistic hair is not easy to achieve. I try to choose best hair for my model, and also choose some shoot angle to hide artefacts when using trans map hair.
Here is my results : http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=34012

And try to do some animation as in this "new" OcDs version, the animation seems to work well : http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=49418

I have LAMH, but have not enough time to make a good hair setup.
For material, I try to have mix material with diffuse and specular.

[bpzen]

your hair renders look fantastic, any chance you would share some basics on the node set up?

[itou31]

Hi,

Thanks.
There is no specific node setup.
After auto conversion, some hair are only diffuse map and other could have already mix material.
What I do with single material, I add a mix material node, add a specular material with same entries, and then play with amount on the mix node.
You can add a post processing node on the diffuse map before input to specular (of specular material).
Adding glossy material to a second mix allow some wet aspect.
But the secret is to choose the right "realistic" hair.
Here is my list :
Augusta Hair for Genesis, Genesis 2 Female(s) : not tested yet
Leyton Hair for Genesis 3 Female(s) and Genesis 2 Female(s) : not tested yet
Flirty Hair for Genesis 2 Female(s) : not tested yet
Fancy Hair : good (like Janna hair)
Pyrit Hair for Genesis 2 Female(s) : good
Actual Hair 2 : good
Estal Hair : medium
Charlie Hair for Genesis 2 Female(s) : curves (long render)
Aubree Hair for Genesis 2 Female(s) : not good (long hair version), bug on the front
Janna hair : good
Cyra hair for gen 2 female : not tested yet
Chase hair (g3F) : good with IRAY

Check on different renders at daz / renderosity or at deviantart before buying.

[TRRazor]

Alternatively you can take a look at RedSpec TGX Hair which should be out pretty soon, after it has been thoroughly tested.
It's a dedicated hair shader aimed specifically at transmapped hair but will also support strand hair some time after release.

You can check out some comparison screenshots in my gallery here: http://trrazor.deviantart.com/gallery/

[bpzen]

Hi T, yea I been waiting for the hair shader form you for a while how about releasing a beta or an eta seems this one been "coming soon for a yer"

[TRRazor]

Yeah, believe me when I say: If it was only up to us, the shader would have been out long ago.
Only problem is, that the Poser plug-in needs some tweaks for it to work correctly.

Those tweaks - however - are being done as we speak by the plug-in developer, so it really shouldn't be long from now on.

Sorry for the hold-up

[Hydra]

My 2 cents here is that you need to start with decent enough hair up front. I've been using Reality for years, and frankly most hair just plain sucks.

Ask people with renders that you like about the hair they used. First and foremost that will go a long way for your renders.

Much of the newer hair Daz is putting out is quite good. iRay would make bad hair look really bad so I'm sure they are going to churn out better hair.

Some hair has poor initial textures (not realistic) which is annoying. Some have pre-baked gloss and highlights which is annoying. Some have poor spectacular maps.

[bpzen]

Yeah, believe me when I say: If it was only up to us, the shader would have been out long ago.
Only problem is, that the Poser plug-in needs some tweaks for it to work correctly.

Those tweaks - however - are being done as we speak by the plug-in developer, so it really shouldn't be long from now on.

Sorry for the hold-up

Can you release the DAZ hair shader and then poser plug in when the teaks are done? On another note, how about converting the wet skin shaders to daz in your free time? :0)

I used Poser and the octane plugin the past few years i cant even open Poser anymore after 40 days using DAZ

[TRRazor]

Can you release the DAZ hair shader and then poser plug in when the teaks are done?

We're definitely aiming for a coupled release, since we don't want to neglect either community.

A short status update:

The Poser plug-in still needs some additional workarounds, which we're developing in close collaboration with the plug-in developer.
The majority of tweaks is already in though and it really shouldn't be long from now.
Since he is working on integrating 2.24 and also 3.0 features into the plug-in as well, it will take a little bit of time though, until all functionality we're aiming to get will be integrated.
We've already started developing user documentation (which in our case is a big part of the actual work we're doing with RedSpec - showing people, beginners to professionals, how they can get our stuff looking the way they want. We want to make it as easy as possible for everybody, and this takes time...)

The DAZ Studio plug-in is essentially finished. Essentially, because we still have to implement the changes suggested by users during closed beta testing. This is however a short and quick update, which can be done in a very short amount of time.

All in all we're aiming for an end of August beginning of September release - but that is only, if everything goes well with the Poser plug-in.

how about converting the wet skin shaders to daz in your free time? :0)

That's actually a huge part of our problem - we're doing everything in our spare time, and one of us just had his son born. So free time has become more and more of a rare and valuable commodity for us, which we're definitely willing to trade in to a certain degree, to help everyone enjoy Octane in combination with Poser/DAZ Studio
a little bit more.
Once the hair shaders are out, we'll update our homepage with a new and fresh design, which will also incorporate all of our "older" Poser shaders converted to DAZ Studio.

Please, bare with us a little while longer - it will be worth it - thanks

PS: You can check our some promo renders here: http://trrazor.deviantart.com/gallery/5 ... ial-Promos