Strand Based Hair Surface Parameters
Cryphius
Posts: 64
Is there documentation anywhere showing that the surface settings are for strand based hair? It's kind of ridiculous that if you google any of these terms you get literally 3 results.
Values like:
Hair Growth Group ID
PS Hair Seed
PS Reduce Length Amount"
PS Interpolation Segment Length
I want to know what they actually do instead of guessing, like what's the difference between PS Hairs Density vs "ADDITIONAL Hairs Density" . And what is the technical difference between the indentical values in PS and PR.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Frankly, SBH looks so bad and the perimeters are so obscur that I stopped even attempting to utilize it.
So what is better than strand based hair? It's defintiely not the flat planes that have been used forever.
The problem with SBH is it requires a ton of work to get looking good. It looks terrible to start, but if you mess with it long enough it can be damn good. It's just a colossal pain when you dont actually know what half the values really do. You are guessing for SO MUCH of it
OOT's and Sarah Payne's hair looks miles better than SBH.
Yes. And its seems to be extremely finicky when using on a different character.
Oh, and it's not d-force compatible unless you're a PA.
The PA restriction is ridiculously limiting. It's making me just want to switch to blender for good. The fact that you have to be a PA to make "high resolution" is borderline fascist.
im still confused about the differences - if there are any - between the PA-created SBH and the SBH Editor's SBH.
the surface properties that are present on a PA-created SBH are very similar to the workflow of the SBH editor, but not totally.
If the PA created SBH is the same as the SBH editor SBH, it seems doubly unfair that PA's get dforcable SBH and the additional parameters in Surfaces. Surely we can at least get the surface properties too - yeesh.
my dumb guess is PS hairs would be 'Style' hairs and PR hairs would be 'Real' hairs, but i have no idea.
I thought PS was PreSimulation and PR was PreRender. But that's just a guess.
well if u know so much why are u asking
found this
Thanks. That's a good start. I just wish daz would publish a document for all the parameters. Like, Growth ID and Seed parameters for example have me intrigued. I wanna know if there's reproducible results with the seed.
Also, it's not even DAZ's program, they acquired it from Girabaldi Express whose old site is mostly defunct. From what I can tell, they simply integrated it into the menus and tweaked the UI.
There used to be a wiki on the girabaldi site but it seems to 404 error now.
is the SBH hair that PA's use the same as the girabaldi one?
Some of the surface settings dont relate to anything that's actually in the SBH editor, Growth ID being one of them. (cant be that important if it's not even in the editor)
As mentioned above: PS stands for "pre simulation" PR "pre render" that's why there are a bunch of similar settings. When tweaking, I will generally tweak PR settings but leave PS ones alone. hair growth group id im not positive - but I'm pretty sure its only relevant to simulations and how things collide - so not really something I'd bother with tweaking. Seed is just a random seed - lets say youre using clumping the hairs will clump to randomly generated strands a new seed will change where those are generated.
I think someone also mentioned most of the settings for dforce hairs have matching settings in the strand based hair editor - personally I would highly recomend experimenting with all the settings in the stand based hair editor, as you will get muuuuuuuuuuuch faster feedback. Seriously. Learn the settings there, you can then apply your knowlege in the materials panel, where things update much more slowly.
The strand based hair editor is definitely not well documented, but it also is extremely capable if you stick it out and learn how to use it - not to toot my own horn (okay tooting a littlelot) but I heavily disagree that traditional mesh hair looks any better (and if they do look similarly good they will, like oots hairs they will tend to end up far more resource intensive. oot hairs make my computer crawl)
some examples:
Yeah, but j cade you're honestly the only person I've seen who can make them look good, and you obviously put in a ton of time for each hair.
The SBH on sale looks nowhere near as excellent as your renders, which is really disappointing. When SBH first came out, I was so jazzed. Now I just avoid them entirely.
Some of them look pretty decent, but I avoid them completely as well. I have a half decent computer, but I can't deal with the load times for them - waiting like a half an hour for a test render to pop up is a bit much. I know I can tweak the settings down to get it to compute faster, but then it looks like garbage anyway, and I'm left without an actual preview of what I'll end up with. Not worth it, really, when an OOT hair or Windfield would look as good, if not better, AND I can see it within like a minute.
I will say, though, that SBH seems to drape a heck of a lot quicker than mesh-based dforce hair from like Linday or Biscuits.
just because PA's are bad at SBH isnt an indictment on SBH itself
If they can't give us good SBH, I tend to believe there's a problem with the tool, not with the PA's.
Changing the shader to a basic plastic one or something probably would help for test renders... loads like 10 times faster than dual lobe etc.
I think we need some clarity on what is being discussed here.
This is NOT strand based hair --- it's a dforce object that was modeled in the strand based editor. Just like fiber mesh hair was modeled in zbrush and EXPORTED as an object that was rigged in DS.
How do I know it's not strand based? Can you load it into the strand based editor and modify EVERY part of the model. No!
Go to the SB editor and create a simple hair - you don't even have to style it. Now open the surface pane in DS for the hair and look at the properties. I guarantee you will not see any PS or PR or seed settings.
Yes, this is built from the Garibaldi plugin -- but Garibaldi was built for the Renderman Ricurves algorithm. Something that works great in the 3dl engine but iRay does not natively support ANY strand based system.
To work in iRay, the strand based hair has to be converted to an object that iRay understands and has to be small enough to keep your system from throwing a fit. As a dforce hair, it has to be converted again to something that the dforce hair engine understands. All those PS and PR settings are the dforce copy of the values EXPORTED from the strand base editor.
Let's be clear --- this is dforce hair that was created in the strand based editor and EXPORTED to a dforce object. It is not strand based hair.
Theres definitely time involved but it realy isn't that much per hair. To demonstate I styled a hair in 30 minutes: from creating a new strand object to hitting render. obviously I could spend more time tweaking it, but its certainly renderable.
The "time" involvement is much more historical. I am very familiar with the strand based hair editor - I bought garibaldi, (on which it is based) when it first came out, which was in the genesis 1 era (and also used blender's particle hair which is conceptually similar). Creating any individual hair is relatively fast because its supported by literal years of experience.
So theres definitely time involved, but I see it as no different than the time one might take to do something like figuring out skin settings, lighting, modelling, etc. I've spent a bunch of time learning skin settings experimenting tweaking making presets so when I work on any individual skin I can click a preset and be ready to go. I've spent time creating presets for every hdrihaven hdri and rendering out preview thumbnails so I can just click and add one in. I've spent time leaning to sculpt in blender so I don't have to rely on dialspinning to get a face exactly how I want it. I've spent a bunch of time learning how the strand editor works so I can create any hair posed exactly how I want it in a reasonable amount of time
also making sure tesselation is set to 2 and not 3 - I do that for plenty of my final renders too. 3 is more accurate but takes almost twice as much memory
with tesselation set to 2 and interpolation in the .7-1.0 range strand hairs generally take less memory than complex mesh hairs like OOTs. More geometry memory (and tbf I think DS definitely has some sort of memory bottlenecking here as it takes longer to load the geoetry into memory than the textures) but they need fewer and smaller maps so you can end up making up the difference in texture memory (oot hairs use about 8 4k maps)
This is no longer correct as of the most recent version iray supports rendering curves. Although I do not know if DS supports this fully yet as DS strand hair predates this being added to Iray.
Regardless, I disagree that DS strand based hair is just mesh hair a la fiber mesh. If you look at the shader both SBH made in the SBH editor and dforce hair both use you can shade them both along the intercept which is impossible to do with mesh hair (as mesh based hair has no concept of a root and therefore no intercept). It may not be as memory efficient, but that does not mean it is not still strand based hair
speaking of SBH, have you been able to transfer to G8.1?
SBH i made on G8 dont seem to be fitting to G8.1. The style lines show that they are fitted and follow G8.1, but when I render/Preview PR hairs, it doesnt follow G8.1
I have tried:
Certainly true. But, as I said, so far I've seen no PA's create SBH as beautiful as yours. If they did, I'd buy them in an instant.
My impression is that Daz's poor documentation and the steep learning curve has frightened most PA's (and users) away from the tool.
To be honest, I'm just disappointed. When the SBH was first announced, I imagined the store would soon be full of photorealistic hairs like the ones you create. But that never happened. Not even close.
I have not :( my guess is because the sbh editor relies on material zones and g8.1 adds a new material zone
I really wish I'd done more of my hairs on skullcaps I did some that way, but a couple of my favs need recreating
though this def seems like something daz might be able to fix given that, as you mention, the preview lines display correctly
Id suggest giving them time. like I said I've been using it for years. Most vendors making dforce hair have been making mesh hair for years they know exactly what they're doing and how best to optimize - I've tried making mesh hair and the attempts were sad because I dont have that knowedge but I'm sure I could spend a bunch of time and improve. I would expect other vendors to be better at something theyve been doing for years than something they have been doing for what? less than a year?
compare one of mada's 1st dforce clothes
look at the lack of seams how flat it looks!
with one of their most recent
A deforceable shirt with pockets and thickness. Its so beautiful!
Even mada needed time to get the most out of dforce clothes, and they're beyond amazingly talented. I think the same is likely to hod for dforce hair
Sure, but it has been nearly 2 years, and the SBH of today looks virtually identical as to what was first offered.
I mean, look at one of the most recent hairs from Phil: https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-becs-hair-for-genesis-8-females
It's just...not realistic at all.
unless DAZ decides to add groom export to it for Unreal
I will continue to avoid Dforce strandbased hairs like the plague
fur being the only exception and honesly I prefer non-dforce fur IE Fibermesh fur you can FBX export
Dforce hairsheets are fine, I can use those in iClone and Unreal too whith PhysX or Apex cloth
that vendor is bad at all types of hair, hardly a good example.
That's something I haven't tried yet, might give that a go later this evening - thanks for the tip!