Anon is trying to learn How to rig Sim Hair ~Send Help

PandaAnonymous

I've been trying to figure out how to properly rig sim hair because goodness it's so hard to find the hair. I tried a few different tutorials I've come across but most of them are out of date.

I'm a newbie of newbies and I don't know a lot of about 3d and all these things... I'm more of a drawer to be quite honest so this is the first time I actually dabble here. 

So here is me seeking advice, tutorials, and tips on how to right sim hair either s4 or s3. If anyone can point me in the right direction please do, if not just watch in amusement as I carry on. 

PandaAnonymous

This is the first Sim hair I did

 I have no idea how I manage to actually get the file so I can finally import it to DAZ but there it is.

I'm obviously doing something wrong because all those white hairs are not on purpose.

I also encounter a problem that when I change poses the face gets disoriented, so I had to equipped hair last.

SixDs

It is a difficult question to answer generically, Panda, as a lot will depend upon how the conversion was done and the import format, as well as how the hair itself was constructed. I am assuming that, if you got it into DAZ Studio, it has been converted to a Wavefront object format (*.obj). Sometimes textures will import, sometimes not - my experience is that procedural surfaces will work, but will require tweaking of the surface settings in DAZ Studio, while image-based textures may require manually applying them in the Surfaces tab. In your example, it appears that you have the diffuse (colour) maps, but not the opacity maps, which may be the source of the white areas, but I'm guessing.

As for the rigging, that will almost never work in such conversions, so you will need to re-rig it in DAZ Studio. The latter is a bit of a technical task for a newcomer, especially with a fairly complex hair prop. The first thing that you will notice is the separate mesh ribbons of which the hair is comprised. If you turn your viewport from texture shaded to smooth shaded, that will give you a clearer view of the "ribbons" that I am referring to. Those are what you will need to work with and rig to impart movement into the hair. The strands (or at least those you want to move) will need to be rigged, either individually, or part of a group (which is how they would have been rigged originally in all probability i.e. bangs left and right, sides left and right, back, etc.). A lot of planning is required in order to achieve the types of movement you will need, prior to even beginning the rigging process. Since you must work with the individual strands, they should be discretely identified as nodes (groups of actual polygons). It is unlikely that they already are within your .obj file. Apart from already having a completed mesh, much of the work from a basic object onwards will be tantamount to creating your own hair prop from scratch - a lot of work. Whether that work should be attempted within DAZ Studio, or done first in a modelling program may be a matter of opinion. But the actual rigging itself, when you get to that point, will need to be done within DAZ Studio. I don't mean to discourage you, but you may be biting off more than you can chew as a novice if your goal is simply to get that particular hair rigged, rather than being prepared to invest a great deal of time in learning a fairly advanced content creation skill.

As for having the hair move with the figure as it changes poses, that part is easy. I always fit the hair to the figure's head using the translate, rotate and scale dials under the Parameters tab as required, with the figure in its default pose position. Once I get it fitted the way I like, I then parent it to the figure's head with "parent in place" checked. That done, the hair should now stay properly in place on the head as you change poses.

PandaAnonymous

SixDs said:

 

Okay well, you are not wrong on the format, it really did take me awhile to actually get the obj file. There isn't a lot of tutorials that give a clear know how to how to convert them so everything I'm doing is pretty much on a "let's see what happens when I do this" And yes, I did mess with the surface dials but I wasn't sure what I was doing so that didn' go too well. I used maps for them. 

It's not just this hair that I want to rig, heck it's not even this hair I want to rig, I'm just using it for tail and error.... I'm having a hard time trying to finding the hair styles that I want to use in my models. It wouldn't be such a bad thing to focus my time on, it might help me learn how to create hair on my own.

I did that but I think I messed it up somehow when I parented it to my model's head... just something went wrong. 

SixDs

Importing .obj files into DAZ Studio can be a hit-or-miss affair at the best of times, unfortunately, especially those that have been converted from a different format. Generally the mesh itself will import without problems, but the rest can be a bit of a crap shoot. Sometimes trying to create a converted object that will import perfectly into Studio may be more work than just fixing things once they are imported, then saving the corrected object back out of DAZ Studio for re-use. The exception to this, as I said, is the rigging, which will always need to be redone with conversions, as rigging tends to be specific to the application. Each hair prop is different, so the rigging will need to be specific to each. If you do try to do the rigging, I wouldn't worry too much if the tutorials are a little dated, as basic, often referred to as "legacy", rigging hasn't changed much over time. More advanced weight-mapped rigging is newer, but usually that won't be necessary to impart basic movements to the hair, and can be something to explore later once you get the hang of basic rigging.

Regarding the maps that you have posted, two points:

1. The first is what is referred to as a Diffuse map, the second is what would be the transparency map (often shortened to just "transmap") which would go in the opacity channel. However, something is wrong there, as the transmap doesn't seem to belong to the same hair as the opacity map - one or the other is wrong for that hair, thus the problems. Normally the transmap will essentially look like a black and white version of the diffuse map, or at least correspond to the same coloured areas of the diffuse map. In the case of the two posted, they do not match.

2. You really shouldn't be posting full-sized versions of the maps here, because though it was not your intent, doing so really constitutes a form of distribution, which really isn't usually permitted for reasons of copyright. You should click on the little gear icon in the upper right of that post and click on "edit". That will re-open the post for editing. Now, mouse over each image at the bottom in turn, and you will see "delete" listed at the bottom. Click on that for each image and confirm the deletion, then resave the post. That will ensure everything remains on the up-and-up.