Begging for dynamic hair tips...
Boojum the brown bunny
Posts: 348
Hi Guys, a Star Citizen Video Contest has been announced and I'd like to use Carrara to render the animation... but I simply can not get my hair jitter free. Not in any professional quality sense. Does ANYONE have some settings to remove the jitter from animated dynamic hair in Carrara? If I can't get it working then I have to fall back to Poser Pro... even though I'd rather use Carrara. Any tips at all?
Thanks,
Boojum
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Comments
This is just a shot in the dark as I don't do animation, but it might be caused by randomized elements in the hair shader (frizz and the like), perhaps their values change from frame to frame?
First of all... do not calculate the simulation with other elements in the scene - at all!
Just the subject and the hair.
And more, instead of the subject, animate a sphere primitive of the proper size (or sphere's of the proper sizes, placement) to follow the animation of the subject, and then get rid of the subject too.
Any extra stuff in the scene will cause unhappy effects - sometimes.
I have been entirely unsuccessful in removing jitter for mine, with the frizz or waves in the shader - but when I removed those, making it straight, the jitter disappeared entirely.
3D Lust gave me some settings on how he got his working beautifully with waves and frizz on Sphere Primitives. I have not do it this way yet, but if you search the forum for Dynamic Hair, and find my thread, look for the comments by him and Holly. (and others) it was some time ago already.
Holly Wetcircuit has tutorial(s) on the subject, but I cannot remember to what extent. It's probably the best place to start.
I have the Advanced Carrara Techniques training set, and I use the V4 Proxy and the hair that comes with that set for mine - but I'm nearing "Experimentation Mode" for dynamic hair - since I need the hair curly, and I cannot have those Jitters!!!
Good luck, my friend!
Ooops.
I forgot to mention:
Once the simulation is done, you can save the scene and add what you want for the render process.
It's the simulation that really needs the scene to be empty.
I had a skydome in a scene once. It took a long time for me to figure out why the hair was going caterwonky! Even setting it to avoid collisions and such... it still messed stuff up. Only include what you need for the simulation itself. Then save. Then bring in the rest of the elements and render ;)
Any tips on how to get the sphere to move with the figures head when the figure isn't here? I think that if I remove the figure then the sphere would no longer travel where their head was.
Boojum the brown bunny
I know some people used proxy objects parented to the figure and had moderate success.The main figure was set to to no collisions. I would run the sim, without the figure dressed, then after the simulation, add the clothes and hide the visibility of the proxy objects.
You may also need to adjust the physical properties of the proxy objects under the physics tab to something low bounce and low friction.
I don't have a lot of experience with animating hair as my system is old and slow. The tips I'm listing are just what I've gleaned from reading the threads here.
Air dampening will help a lot.
Fast forward to the end of your animation and place them again. Using Align (Ctrl + K) and selecting all axis should help. For this you would first select the head. Shift select the head sphere and Ctrl + K and select all axis > OK. Don't forget to deselect the actual head before moving the sphere exactly where it belongs.
Now repeat that for each of the other spheres that you need - only use what you need.
Now is the matter of going in between and getting the movements in where they belong.
It might be easier, if there's a lot of these to key in, is to actually parent spheres in place, and duplicate the spheres once and un-parent those, and use Align directly to those spheres along the timeline - still starting from the first, then last, then going in between.
So any sort of complex actions and rotations I will need to hand key to match the head movements precisely? I may not have time for that. I have about 10 days to get this all laid out and then I need to be rendering or it won't be done in time for the 27th. Let me see how it goes.
Boojum the brown bunny
I'm sorry, guys.. thank you for the help, but it's taking me hours to do things that should only take minutes. I can't use my time this way and still get the animation out in time. It's taking me hours to do the simplest things. I'll need to switch to poser for this one.
Boojum the brown bunny
a new method for me that works better is to paint hair on a long conforming hair instead of the figure
still experimenting but getting much less crazy results
It's actually not about dynamic hair at this point. It's about time, which I don't have a lot of... and yes, I have been working with dynamic hair since they came out with it...
The current recommendation is for me to hand animate a sphere to follow the head of my character, delete everything else from my scene, use some no friz settings and dynamically animate the hair, then import it back into the main scene, make the sphere invisible.. etc... and all while experimenting with different settings.
Since I don't have time for that, I decided to modify my animation. Now I'm going to superimpose my character with hair gently blowing in the wind, slowly stirring. For that I think I can use Conforming Hair and morphs to make it sway in the wind.
So I load PH Punk hair onto genesis... move in 1/4 second.. use the hair morphs to lift the hair.. move forward 1/4 second. Use the hair morphs to put the hair back down. Highlight the two key frames so I can copy them.. copy is greyed out. I can't copy and paste them. Ok, make them a clip... right click.. no choice to make them a click.. search through 2 video tutorials and the manual to find out the button to turn it into a clip is hidden at the bottom of the properties section for the track, well out of view. Remember, all I want to do is quickly rock and roll the hair gently moving so I can move on to other parts of my layout and I'm already down an hour and a half.
So I make a clip. Then I make a master clip of it. Then I begin putting the master clip back into my NLA. Guess what, it looks like making an clip doesn't capture the morphing parameter changes. Now I've used up two and a half hours, am completely frustrated, and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
So now I'm in the position of moving the timeline forward 1/4 second, change the parameter values, move it forward 1/4 second, move them back, move them forward 1/4 second, move them up, move forward 1/4 second, move them back.
All the while I can see that Copy greyed out. I could knock this out in 2 minutes if I could just copy and paste those keyframes...
That's why I apologizes to people in this thread. I'm very much afraid that if I use Carrara I'm not going to get my layout done in 10 days.. I only have a couple hours a day to work on it and right now that couple of hours is spent getting nothing done. I CAN animate it in poser in the same amount of time, including dynamic hair.
When I say that everything is taking an order of magnitude longer, this is what I mean. You should be able to copy and paste keyframes in the actor timeline. You should be able to make a master clip of the keyframes in the actor timeline that uses the morphing parameters for punk hair. It shouldn't be this hard when using keyframe animation. You shouldn't have to manually rock the 3 parameter dials I'm using every 1/4 second.
And I know you feel that, with enough practice, that this will all be easy. I'm not sure your correct given the years I've dedicated to using Carrara, but even if you are that expertise won't happen in time for this project.
I've used Poser, Vue, and Carrara for years. Carrara has been my main render engine because I love it so. I could have done a good job on dynamic hair and character layout in poser by now because they let you do things like copy and paste keyframes. Such a simple thing, yet it speeds things up.
So right now I'm frustrated and angry and really don't want to look at my computer any more today.
Boojum the brown bunny
In my initial testing, the jitterring issues seems to be related to having hair guides(any part) falling below the surface of a closed object(like a sphere). So its maybe trying to detect collisions with the inside as well as the outside causing the jitter.
For example. I applied Hair with Kink and Frizz shaders to a plane and then animated it. No jitter. Then I used a sphere with similar settings. Major jitter. I adjusted the Simulation->Collision Distance to 3.00, so guide hairs(from root to tip) do not enter the sphere. Now, no more jitter in animation(or at the least, nothing close to what I got before).