Strand-Based Hair Mini-Tutorial

Eboshijaana

Exeter said:

peenwolf said:

Exeter said:

peenwolf said:

I don't understand the texturing of SBH...

I was playing with Exeter's Neolithic set (i liked the texture of the Shawl), but where is the overall texture of the hair pattern actually coming from?  It's not on the SBH surfaces anywhere, or is it?

 

 

SBH isn't a texture, it's appearance is controlled by the density and length the hair when you create it on the target surface. You can edit the hair by using the 'edit strand based hair' function, then under the 'density' tab in the window that pops up you'll see the settings controlling length and density. Be careful about going too far, if you get the density function too high it can bring you system to its knees when you try to render the image.

Thanks.  I think I had it on quite high density on that image i posted.

What I meant to ask is: there is clearly light, dark, and differently-coloured patches of the outfit.  How do those variations of the strand colours arise across the surface without a texture?  Or are they just shadows/highlights?

In the Neolithic clothes I was going for the effect of worn/used furs, so I put a texture on the shawl surface with a bump map, then used a relatively low density for the hair. When the clothing drapes, you get different degrees of the underlying surface showing through. That gives the the variations you see. It results from a combination of the hair, the underlying surface, and the orientation of the hair changing due to dForce.

Having been in the presence of an actual mink coat (ages old,note) that looks -frightening- accurate.

Gordig

marble said:

Gordig said:

Did another trial with MilCat. I put a little more effort into styling the fur, but the styling controls are not very satisfying to use at this point, so I'd have to do quite a bit more work to get the full effect I'm after.

Yeah, I got stuck with that bottle brush style too, only on a much smaller scale. I don't envy your task with the comb!

Actually, I rarely even touch the comb tool because I don't like how it handles. I do as much of the styling as possible with just the curl and surface attract tools.

peenwolf said:

Today I was trying to make a really ragged/clumpy fur collar (simlar to Night's Watch uniform from Game of Thrones).  

Is there any way to smooth out the jagged hair segments?

Try lowering the segment length, both under the curve settings and interpolation. If you're using the frizz parameter, keep it very low.

 

Eboshijaana said:

Gordig said:

Posted this in another thread, so I thought I'd share it here, too. I spent some time playing around with surface settings so that fur would match the creature's base texture. I present to you the Daz Jaguar, without the base texture (meaning that all the coloring is coming from the hair itself) and with, and my settings. The hair itself is completely default since I was only interested in the surface settings.

Anisotropy off and the fur looks like its base.

I myself use these settings. It is important to put your base texture in EVERY colour section, so it shows.
 

I haven't found that to be the case, myself. I started with the texture map under every color section, but got better results by applying it more selectively. As for anisotropy, I did a render of the cat without anisotropy, and it doesn't seem to have changed anything. Are you rendering in Iray or 3DL?

Eboshijaana

I'm rendering in Iray. The settings I've posted are the ones I use and they are very good for me so far.

lilweep

I find that if I adjust 'scale curves' upwards in the SBH editor, then it really slows down computation and causes the comb tool to become unbearably laggy. I dont really get why that is - I would think density and segment length would be the most offensive computationally, but they dont seem to have much impact for me.  It kind of puts a limit on how long you can make hairs and still comb them.

 

GLE

I'd like to read your tips about surface settings for stranded hair. I've been trying to get "bright" ("metallic"?) hair, but I'm not getting how the shader works. I'd like to replicate this kind of style:

[I didn't adjust hair thickness in this example, because I don't usually take shots this close and coarser hair do better at lower resolutions. Made with this freebie, with my custom Iray shader.]

Also something similar to the main image of the German Shepherd, for color, detail, brightness and reflections. Anyting in between these 2 examples would be fine.

Thank you :)

RKane_1

Diva? Thank you so much for this tutorial. It will help immensely. :)

RKane_1

I know there is a symmetry feature early in the Strand Hair Process but is there one for finishing at the end or a way to have the same hair on the other side?

Asari

Diva, many thanks for your tutorial and all your tips in this thread! The sbh editor is quite challenging and many features not self explanatory and your tutorial makes the beginning so much easier! I'm currently trying to put together some tips on advanced hair technique for the sbh editor but without your tutorial, help and guidance I would probably never have started playing around with the editor.

Samanthie

Thanks for this great tutorial Diva! :)

Catherine3678ab

Yes thank you for the tutorial Diva!

I've scanned over the pages and a few points which may or not be of interest.

1. Yes Garibaldi can paint on the G3 and G8 figures IF one first applies a collapsed uv-set [easy to make one - remember to remove the eyelashes!] ...

2. Apparently Garibaldi still works in D/S ... but no, it cannot render Iray anything. I found before that applying proper D/S shaders gives better results too.

3. Garibaldi and the DForce and Strand base hairs are not recognized by each other. Which is sad 'cause IF Garibaldi could, then from said plugin one could export out their .obj files.

4. Like the Garibaldi creations, the Strand Hair creations can be saved out as Wearable Presets. [remove everything [all those ghost bodies] from the scene except the target figure, parent the stranded hair to the figure, select the figure and save as a wearable preset]

With Garibaldi presets, only other owners of the program could use them. I expect the same would be for the Stranded Hair Creations.

takezo_3001

PDF'd and bookmarked, Thanks for doing this, we all love you for it!

3Diva

@RKane_1 @Asari @Samanthie @Catherine3678ab @takezo_3001 You're quite welcome. I'm really happy that you guys found the mini-tutorial helpful. :)

3Diva

Asari said:

Diva, many thanks for your tutorial and all your tips in this thread! The sbh editor is quite challenging and many features not self explanatory and your tutorial makes the beginning so much easier! I'm currently trying to put together some tips on advanced hair technique for the sbh editor but without your tutorial, help and guidance I would probably never have started playing around with the editor.

I'm looking forward to seeing your tips for advanced Strand-Based Hair techniques. :) I hope you send me the link (or post it here) so I, and others, can check it out. 

3Diva

RKane_1 said:

I know there is a symmetry feature early in the Strand Hair Process but is there one for finishing at the end or a way to have the same hair on the other side?

As far as I know, there's not really a way to do symmetry at the end. That would be cool though. While I don't like "perfect" symmetry (as 100% symmetry can hurt the look of realism), a way to give the hair symmetry at the end (and then making minor adjustments to one side so that it's not 100% symmetrical) would be really cool and helpful. As far as I know there's not really a way to do that though.

Daventaki

Very first go with SBH!  Thank you Divamakeup for the tutorial!!  Excuse the hair color i was messing around with it a bit still learning kinda like the light streaks.

Do wish there was a way to do symmetry I like the right side better than the left..

 

Daventaki

Second go!  I like the way it came out except for the part and right in the front looks like a bald spot.  So i picked up a trick from L'Adair in another site forum and duplicated the hair then nudged it a little to make it look better. But if anyone has any better suggestions of doing this with the actual SBH I am all ears.

Original on left, duplicated on right.

 

Asari

That looks pretty good! Just one tip - it looks like you used the random root angle settings in the tweak tab. In my opinion this feature is less suited for human head hair but better for animal fur, at least with the dual lobe blended sbh shader, the default shader for sbh.

Catherine3678ab

Well as we grow older our hair does tend to grow thinner up top, and also recedes a little more lol ...

Too frizzy looking for character type. Smooth strands ;-) Frizzy = dead hair and time to cut it real short.

Style is nice :-)

 

nonesuch00

Frizzy, at least that kind, does means overprocessed hair - too much color stripping, too dying, too much of whatever type processing.

Daventaki

So she likes to change her hair color to much!    I have tweaked and played and cant get it the way I want it to look.  If I only set everything to 0 it looks very choppy..   Oh well will play more later.

Crios

I donìt know, but someone has tryed to create the grass?

Gordig

Crios said:

I donìt know, but someone has tryed to create the grass?

That's actually what the horribly named product Foreground Blends is.

3Diva

Crios said:

I donìt know, but someone has tryed to create the grass?

 

In the original strand-based hair announcement thread, people were posting all kinds of cool experiments - thatch roofs, fur, peach fuzz, tall wild grass, short lawn grass, horse manes and tails, etc - all kinds of cool stuff.

Crios

Gordig said:

Crios said:

I donìt know, but someone has tryed to create the grass?

That's actually what the horribly named product Foreground Blends is.

No, it's a my experiment, made in 2 minutes.

jepegraphics

I can't thank Divamakeup enough for this thread and to encourage people to play and to dare. A lot is possible since Garibaldi was incorporated and I have to admit, I couldn't live without it anymore. Not only I have a complete facial and body hair presets set included in my Roderick for Diego 8 character here in the store, but the longer I use the hair generator, the more I get used to it and can individualize my characters. Some very new samples I have attached, Raw's Satyr is furry now, and no, I have not used Underbelly's native hair (except brows), I made my own or used my Roderick presets, and African hair, yes, find out how to get that pattern/structure into the hair - it's totally worth it! (Samples are from my Patreon gallery, so it's artwork, no straight out of the rendering. But I hope you get the point.)

Sevrin

jepegraphics said:

I can't thank Divamakeup enough for this thread and to encourage people to play and to dare. A lot is possible since Garibaldi was incorporated and I have to admit, I couldn't live without it anymore. Not only I have a complete facial and body hair presets set included in my Roderick for Diego 8 character here in the store, but the longer I use the hair generator, the more I get used to it and can individualize my characters. Some very new samples I have attached, Raw's Satyr is furry now, and no, I have not used Underbelly's native hair (except brows), I made my own or used my Roderick presets, and African hair, yes, find out how to get that pattern/structure into the hair - it's totally worth it! (Samples are from my Patreon gallery, so it's artwork, no straight out of the rendering. But I hope you get the point.)

The first image reminded me of the Photoshop youtuber Unmesh from the Piximperfect channel.

jepegraphics

Sevrin said:

jepegraphics said:

The first image reminded me of the Photoshop youtuber Unmesh from the Piximperfect channel.

Not sure who that is!  -

Forgot one thing, maybe it was mentioned before in this thread, but you can save a Strand Based Hair Preset also as a Scene Subset, without any figure. So you can build a library of Presets you can use and/or refine again on other characters (of the same figure). Best is of course to save the Scene Subset with in the name mentioned figure like "Underarm G8M" or something like this. Loaded in the scene, it only needs to be made fit again to the character and/or Transformation applied or opened in Editor again to follow the new character.

lilweep

jepegraphics said:

I can't thank Divamakeup enough for this thread and to encourage people to play and to dare. A lot is possible since Garibaldi was incorporated and I have to admit, I couldn't live without it anymore. Not only I have a complete facial and body hair presets set included in my Roderick for Diego 8 character here in the store, but the longer I use the hair generator, the more I get used to it and can individualize my characters. Some very new samples I have attached, Raw's Satyr is furry now, and no, I have not used Underbelly's native hair (except brows), I made my own or used my Roderick presets, and African hair, yes, find out how to get that pattern/structure into the hair - it's totally worth it! (Samples are from my Patreon gallery, so it's artwork, no straight out of the rendering. But I hope you get the point.)

I really like your roderick SBH hair.

I think it's really great that we can also easily tweak and re-style existing hairs, which makes SBH presets very flexible even if just used as a starting point.

It would be cool if more people were onboard with SBH and shared presets.

I was playing around today (attached) - work in progress obviously.  I still find it kind of tedious to style hair because i still can't really predict what it will look like on render and currently im on my laptop which takes a while to render.  Lately I have not experienced as many crashes in the SBH editor as I have experienced previously.

Sevrin

jepegraphics said:

Sevrin said:

jepegraphics said:

The first image reminded me of the Photoshop youtuber Unmesh from the Piximperfect channel.

Not sure who that is!  -

 

Do you have access to Google? 

jepegraphics

lilweep said:

jepegraphics said:

I really like your roderick SBH hair.

I think it's really great that we can also easily tweak and re-style existing hairs, which makes SBH presets very flexible even if just used as a starting point.

It would be cool if more people were onboard with SBH and shared presets.

I was playing around today (attached) - work in progress obviously.  I still find it kind of tedious to style hair because i still can't really predict what it will look like on render and currently im on my laptop which takes a while to render.  Lately I have not experienced as many crashes in the SBH editor as I have experienced previously.

Thank you Lilweep! 

I too think so, it is of course a bit of work to get a good SBH preset, but saving and sharing is not that difficult. Instead all vendors (including DAZ) seem to convert everything into dForce hair. It's fine and ok, unfortunately I seldom can get that to work nicely on my machine, even to let it show up is sometimes a challenge. 

Your SB hair looks wonderful already, I can imagine that it takes a bit to get a loooong hair like that to look good! 

Another tip I wanted to mention: I hope you all use the "ALT GR" key while combing in the style Tab of the SB Hair Editor, to get 3! directions of hair right is often fiddly, holding the ALT GR key while dragging the mouse moves the model in the veiwport and you can quickly get the angle you need to comb in the right direction!