Polite request for hair vendors
Silas3D
Posts: 565
Morning all (or afternoon/evening depending where you are!)
The quality of most hair products (specifically polygonal not fibre) available on the market these days has increased considerably and there are clearly some very talented creators out there.
However, one of my major frustrations is the fact that highlights are STILL baked in. Whilst I appreciate this is convenient for a lot of people, particularly when using 3Delight or Firefly render engines, for those of us that render solely in Lux, Octane, Cycles etc - it really hinders the creative process and realism trying to be achieved.
The irony is in most cases a spec map is included, so there there should be no need for baked highlights!
Without knowing how the textures are created in the first place (i.e. if the highlights are there by default or added in), perhaps it would be a consideration to do a separate zip folder for textures without highlights? Again I don't know how much work this would involve but its a suggestion I'm putting out there.
Similarly, there are also a lot of recent character textures out there that don't include spec maps (not seen any here recently, other marketplaces) and a lot of eye textures STILL have baked in reflections.
My apologies if something like this has already been posted!
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Comments
I tend to agree with you. I'm not a fan of baked on highlights anywhere anytime. Not on hair or eyes or even the occasional tip of the nose. And for what it is worth I do most of my renders in regular ole studio 4.
Aargh don't get me started on eyes hehe! Good to know that I'm not the only one.
Most of the characters I've bought on rival sites never come with specular maps, which is a real downer. I've resorted to matching up ones from other texture sets or creating my own in the majority of instances. As for hair, I can fully appreciate the frustration. When I'm using unbiased engines like Luxrender I often try to minimize the highlights in Photoshop beforehand, but it would no doubt be useful for 3DL renders too.
With specular maps to add in the highlights, and many of these hairs come with them anyway, it shouldn't be very necessary for baked in highlights.
tigerste- you have an adorable avatar :)
Thank you, Novica!
Agreed. There are ways to minimize or remove highlighs, but the point is, should we have to? I mean, it made sense ten years ago, so when I use a Kozaburo hair, for example, I'm willing to do the work to fix them. I feel less enthusiastic about having to do it on new hair.
On a separate note to hair vendors, would it kill you to make a few more wet styles? Like a wet Bob length? Pretty please?
I've even resorted to using a straight diffuse color with no map and relying on the transparency/spec/other maps when using hair...
I've also gone to using my own glass shader on the cornea material and using an almost black for the pupil with no maps to get rid of the 'baked' stuff.
There should be at least 1 'base' without any makeup/baked highlights/etc...and spec maps are a MUST have item.
Good point about highlights, I applaud hair vendors as its something I don't think I could learn to do well in a hurry. That said I still have my pet peeves when it comes to hair.
Admittedly I'm very fussy, because I often need it for my own promos and hair is one of those things like lighting, in the sense that it single handily has the power to make or break a render. :P
What puts me off (personally) is a style that is overly fussy or quirky, I like my hair nice and simple so that ties in well but doesn't make itself the main feature of the character. last one I bought was http://www.daz3d.com/hair/spring-hair - that one just ticked all the right boxes for me. There have been a few other nice sets out since that one, but I'm still mulling over them as they are quite similar to others I already have.
Another problem I've noticed is the placement of the hair line across the forehead, sometimes it is way to high or low for my liking, I wish more vendors would include a morph to adjust this, a large or small forehead can drastically alter the way character looks.
And lastly I've sometimes noticed a tendency for some to add too much glossiness / reflection on black/ebony hair mats - to the point that it looks a bit glassy under direct lighting - but thankfully I haven't encountered this particular problem for a while now :)
@mjc1016, I've used the same trick of removing the diffuse texture altogether, providing the other maps are high enough quality. Often the alpha maps aren't that great and I've been tempted to have a pop at making my own.
@Dogz, I'm a big fan of Valea's work and truly some of the most realistic hair props available, and great textures, but even those still have baked in highlights, so unless I want variations in colour I remove the diffuse and rely on the spec map. With some other hairs in the past I've found using the black texture with baked highlights is actually better than the included spec map hehe!
I'm currently working on my 3rd set for the Koz_Messy hair...for some reason that really old freebie hair is the one I end up using the most.
I'm currently working on my 3rd set for the Koz_Messy hair...for some reason that really old freebie hair is the one I end up using the most.
I know what you mean, it's a great hair.