Creating hair - Is there something like an "easy solution"?

Ryselle-Ryssa

Hi!

Since longer I want to go into creating own hair - which I know is pretty difficult, but one has to start somewhere...

I looked up at youtube and what seemed to be the easiest on the first look was going with zBrush (Fibermesh hair), but is it possible to get this into DAZ?

Or what would you recommend to dive into?

Best wishes

Ryselle

Richard Haseltine

Yes, DS will import ZBrush fibermesh hair - the main issue is taming the amount of data it involves.

Asari

Probably easiest way would be creating your own hair with Studio's built in Strand based Hair editor. It's guide based and relatively easy to learn because it lacks many more complex features other guide based hair creation packages come with. Only PAs have access to dforce tools, so creation of hairstyles that need strand movement if you change poses will be difficult. You can manually brush your hair to fit the new position.

You can import each type of hair as obj and create morphs for them to Studio, as Richard mentioned. I have imported hair with 100.000 of vertices and Studio handles it OK. Of course as expected with huge amount of geometry it will slow your scene down so I would not recommend having the hair in your scene while building your scene and posing your figure. Also, lots of geometry needs lots of RAM otherwise it will kill your system. Hair created in guide-based hair systems are not really meant to be exported and used outside of the app in which they are created because they create the dense hair strands at render time, similar to DAZ's strand based hair, to keep the scene relatively light and free up system memory. Hair to be exported and used in other engines, like Unreal Engine, are usually made like DAZ's transmapped hair.

richardandtracy

There is a free merchant resource skull cap here: https://www.sharecg.com/v/91745/gallery/5/3D-Model/Hair-Caps-For-Genesis-8-or-3-Female-and-Male which you could use as a head end for any mesh you wished to model.

The simplest use would be to use the cap for strand based hair. Which is not easy to get right using the DS tools.

The next simplest would be to model single facet wide strips perpendicular to the skull cap, import into DS and apply a dForce fabric dynamic surface to the strips, and simulate. That would then be a good starting point. Next step, add geoshells to increase the hair density with little computational penalty. After that.. how high is your ambition?

Regards,

Richard.

 

Ryselle-Ryssa

Hi!

Sorry for the delayed answer (I was out because of illness) and thank you for your replies! 

After that.. how high is your ambition?

Basically my goal was to recreate hairstsyles of anime characters  

While I was in bed sick, I put some thoughts in this - purely theoretical. I think what I search forc, an be created rather simple with some 2d planes that get a hair texture and then are formed like you need it... I would give this as an example what I mean (https://vroid.pixiv.help/hc/en-us/articles/360013210674-How-to-decrease-the-number-of-hair-polygons-). The hair seems to be 2D here and basically many of this 2D strands form the hole hair.

The problem: I can create the strand in Hexagon, but if I bend or twist it, it looses its UV map... There is the point I'm stuck ^^

 

richardandtracy

I don't know anything about Hexagon, I must admit. I have tried it, but it's way of working seems utterly irrational to me, and I don't get on with it one little bit. I spend my working life using engineering solid modelling packages and possibly that has ruined me for Hexagon which is a surface modeller. I don't know what to suggest. I described the way I plan to start modelling hair myself when I finish my current big project. I will be using my own home written 3d modeller (that way I know it works the way I want) and I know there are a number of functions I'm going to have to add before I can start - but that's part of the fun.

So, maybe learn Blender? That would open you up to a bigger pool of people who could help. [ I can't load Blender on my machine, as the AV software sees the script engine and kills it.] Blender apparently has a monumentally steep learning curve, though.

Wish I could help more at the moment.

Regards,

Richard.

Catherine3678ab

Ryselle-Ryssa said:

Hi!

Sorry for the delayed answer (I was out because of illness) and thank you for your replies! 

After that.. how high is your ambition?

Basically my goal was to recreate hairstsyles of anime characters  

While I was in bed sick, I put some thoughts in this - purely theoretical. I think what I search forc, an be created rather simple with some 2d planes that get a hair texture and then are formed like you need it... I would give this as an example what I mean (https://vroid.pixiv.help/hc/en-us/articles/360013210674-How-to-decrease-the-number-of-hair-polygons-). The hair seems to be 2D here and basically many of this 2D strands form the hole hair.

The problem: I can create the strand in Hexagon, but if I bend or twist it, it looses its UV map... There is the point I'm stuck ^^

 Then you apply another uvmap.

Hexagon puts "all" to the one line at the bottom of the checker page so you might find it works better to make a strand, uvmap it, then make lots of copies of that strand to move around. Providing all have the same name, selecting all and exporting them out as .obj, then in a fresh instance of Hexagon, import that .obj back in - and all the hair strands will be "one" group [instead of 50 billion]. [Hexagon cannot do 50 billion hairs - runs out of memory]

Some start hairs from a sphere. Shaping the sphere over the head, then cutting it to pieces.

Some make a hat, then have hair that is made to go with the hat [i.e. from just inside the hat downwards, so no hair under most of the hat].

If you make a simple strand of hair, uvmap that - copy it several times [keeping one for back up] then select the lines to reshape it [i.e. don't use those utitlies], then you will not lose the uvmap.

Hexagon is actually pretty good for making cartoon type hairs with.

Squishy

Richard Haseltine said:

Yes, DS will import ZBrush fibermesh hair - the main issue is taming the amount of data it involves.

FBX format supports splines, it would be pretty great if D|S could import splines, that would open up so many options for content portability.