Best hair for Genesis (with a touch of Reality)

CypherFOX

Greetings,
I've been fighting with some hair styles on Genesis recently, most notably the Pure Hair stuff. While it seems to render okay in 3Delight, under Reality it looks like a hair helmet. I feel like its the hair, because the V5 elite ponytail and the Wildmane hairs render just fine in the same lighting circumstances.

So my question to the community is: what hair models are your go-to hairs, and why? What should I be looking at? Do V4 hairs transition over reasonably well to Genesis, and should I be looking at picking up some of those?

So...tell me your favorite hairs, and any hints for making them look particularly good in D|S or Reality...?

Thanks muchly!

-- Morgan

Gone

Ok, I'll bite.

At the moment, my most used hairs are Neftis products - "Historical Curls" and "Beautiful Black Hair Styles". These are fiber mesh hairs and look very realistic. They load fast, render fast and - for most lighting conditions - can pass straight through Reality without modification.

A couple of months back, Mech4D was showing off some fiber mesh creations she had in mind for Genesis and - like many - I'm sitting on pins and needles waiting for them because they look absolutely amazing! She did complete a facial/body hair pack as a commission for DAZ but that still hasn't hit the store yet. More pins and needles!!!

Alessandro is also working on LAMH (Look At My Hair) which is tentatively due out this summer and promises to forever change the way hair looks in DS.

cwichura

Which Pure Hair are you using? I've used Pure Hair Nightlife a number of times in Reality (most recently here), mostly with colours from one of the texture expansion packs for it. My guess is that if you're getting a "plastic hair cap", that your specularity settings are too high in Reality. You could also try adjusting the glossiness as well.

As to using V4 hair on Genesis... Your best bet is to probably load the hair and parent it to Genesis' head. This can work fairly well, provided the hair has suitable movement morphs to keep it out of the shoulders/etc. (Though you can also try enabling smoothing as a work-around to this, typically with a low smoothing iterations count while bumping up the collision iterations.)

Newjade

I just finished a render with Mairy's new "Gregoria Hair" and Swam's "Pyrit Hair" and I am surprised, how well the hair turned out.

bytescapes

Gone said:

A couple of months back, Mech4D was showing off some fiber mesh creations she had in mind for Genesis and - like many - I'm sitting on pins and needles waiting for them because they look absolutely amazing! She did complete a facial/body hair pack as a commission for DAZ but that still hasn't hit the store yet.

THUMP

(noise of Mec4D's hair pack hitting the store)

Available as a bundle or as separate items.

Gone

angusm said:

Gone said:

A couple of months back, Mech4D was showing off some fiber mesh creations she had in mind for Genesis and - like many - I'm sitting on pins and needles waiting for them because they look absolutely amazing! She did complete a facial/body hair pack as a commission for DAZ but that still hasn't hit the store yet.

THUMP

(noise of Mec4D's hair pack hitting the store)

Available as a bundle or as separate items.

Holy cow!!!

You mean all I had to do was ask and they put it in the store?!!!

I should have said something weeks ago! :lol:

Richard Haseltine

Could you try asking for the Millennium Cat 2?

bohemian3

Hiya Cypherfox,

Here's my take on it, but with that two caveats 1) that I've only been at this for six months, and 2) I'm using Max 3d Mental Ray, which is a similar physically based rendering engine to Reality.

So far everything I've transfered over from older V4 M4 generation worked with a few tweaks:

1) Sometimes the transparency maps are way to bright for physically based renderers. You need to adjust the gray levels closer to black (all but the skullcap) to get much softer translucency. When you do this, however, you may need to duplicate the geometry... (Again, all but the skull cap - set that to transparent) and use the morphs to give it a fuller look. (Also, you can combine hair meshes this way as well for countless possibilities, again making the pieces transparent that are not needed !)

Here's the Pure Hair Charming - even though it's for Genesis it still needed these tweaks. The results aren't as good as some of the other products, but passable I think.

And here are four of my favorite
Edmond Hair
Jordan hair
Beautiful Black hair
Orianna hair

Hope that helps
b

CypherFOX

Greetings,
@Gone - Yeah, the Neftis products are gorgeous, and were regularly on sale. I tried to convert them to Genesis, but I'll have to try the parenting thing instead. (I also read that it's a good way to handle Gen4 shoes, so I'll need to try that as well, since there are some V4 shoes I _adore_, but can't use on Genesis. I have Orianne, though.

@cwichura - In fact, it's Pure Hair Nightlife, I believe. I'll post up a piece of a render later, but I'm pretty sure you're right about the specular/glossy problem. I came to a similar conclusion last night, and re-started the render (for the 3rd time) with the hair set to matte. (If you use Reality 2.0, should hair be matte, or matte translucent?) It was around 600 S/p this morning, and was looking a bit better than the previous renders, so hopefully tonight it'll be around 2000 S/p, and I'll know if that's the right direction.

@Newjade - Gorgeous image; I love how the Pyrit hair works there! (And, notably, the forum actually resized it, and preserved the original size!) Great moment, and exceptionally nice job of posing them so close to each other. I always mess that up...

-- Morgan

Gone

Well, if we're going to be posting pictures.... :-)

Here is Neftis Historical Curls with the just released Mech4D face and body hair. All the hair was passed through Reality with no shader tweaks.

If Genesis is selected when you click on the hair, it will automatically be parented. If your character is fairly close to the Genesis default shape, all you need to do is use the Fit Genesis dial to get a good fit. Otherwise, you may have to fiddle with the adjustment and/or scale dials to get the fit snug. Once you get used to it, it doesn't take more than a minute to get the fit right.

RCDeschene

bohemian3 said:

And here are four of my favorite
Edmond Hair
Jordan hair
Beautiful Black hair
Orianna hair

Hope that helps
b

Which one is Lara wearing again?

bohemian3

That's :
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/pure-hair-charming/
Pure charming Hair - with the transparency maps adjusted for physically base renderers like Reality & MR.
b

RCDeschene

bohemian3 said:

That's :
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/pure-hair-charming/
Pure charming Hair - with the transparency maps adjusted for physically base renderers like Reality & MR.
b

Ahh, I see. The order of the pictures through me off a bit.

It's a shame the M5 Pro Suite doesn't include it, it looks really nice.

*Pops it in my Wishlist*

cwichura

Cypherfox said:

@cwichura - In fact, it's Pure Hair Nightlife, I believe. I'll post up a piece of a render later, but I'm pretty sure you're right about the specular/glossy problem. I came to a similar conclusion last night, and re-started the render (for the 3rd time) with the hair set to matte. (If you use Reality 2.0, should hair be matte, or matte translucent?) It was around 600 S/p this morning, and was looking a bit better than the previous renders, so hopefully tonight it'll be around 2000 S/p, and I'll know if that's the right direction.

You would want matte, not matte transparent. Matte transparent is more suited for things like a lampshade with the lamp's light shining out through it, causing the shade to bloom a bit. Setting the hair to matte seems a bit on the drastic side, and most hair will have a bit of a sheen to it that matte won't reproduce. Also, the default roughness for matte textures in Reality is on the high side. 40 (Reality's default) is what the research paper the matte algo is based on lists as "max observed in the real world", and values in the range of 10-20 are much more common.

CypherFOX

Greetings,
I finally finished rendering a few images; the last is the image of the helmet hair I was talking about. Switching from glossy to matte helped some, as you can see in the first two images. The first is with the IBL gain set to 64, and the side-light at around 4. The second leaves the side-light at 4, and drops the IBL to 1.

The darker version reached a good quality level after around 2-3K S/p, but turning up the IBL gain didn't look acceptable until around 7K S/p, and 44 hours of rendering. O_O!

I'll have to do some smaller tests with different roughness and gloss values for the hair, and pick up some of those other hairs mentioned...

Thanks very much!

-- Morgan