Strand Based Hair Surface Parameters

Thyranq

j cade said:

lilweep said:

Thyranq said:

Leonides02 said:

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. 

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. 

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)

Definitely have to try this later today as well! Thanks a lot for the info!

I know the meshes that OOT uses are quite high density, and heavy on memory, and then the textures are quite large as well as numerous, but generally speaking I can hit render and see an image, even with final render settings, within about 2-5 minutes (depending on the scene complexity).

What I've tried with strand hairs I think the MINIMUM I've seen so far has been around 5 minutes to actually start rendering.

I'll try some of these settings out tonight and see what I can come up with - thanks!

There's not a whole lot of strand hairs that I like, but there's a couple that look really great, and I'd like to not have to omit them completely from my options. 

nicstt

Leonides02 said:

Sorel said:

Leonides02 said:

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.

OOT's and Sarah Payne's hair looks miles better than SBH.

 

Depends on the strand based hair.

Depends on the pose used, because no matter how brilliant polygon hair can look, in the wrong pose it looks terrible because the morphs don't allow it to look right.

I tend to prefer strand based hair, because to has depth, funny angles tend to not look infinitely thin.

 

MelissaGT

nicstt said:

Leonides02 said:

Sorel said:

Leonides02 said:

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.

OOT's and Sarah Payne's hair looks miles better than SBH.

 

Depends on the strand based hair.

Depends on the pose used, because no matter how brilliant polygon hair can look, in the wrong pose it looks terrible because the morphs don't allow it to look right.

I tend to prefer strand based hair, because to has depth, funny angles tend to not look infinitely thin.

 

Most polygon hair you can add a dash of dForce to (the cloth engine) to get it to sit more naturally. AprilYSH's hair takes to dForce quite nicely. Windfield's also tends to be on the lighter side (compared to OOT's) and I think could dForce well too. It doesn't take much...just a touch. 

For example, here is AprilYSH's Reina hair with a smidge of dForce to get the back to flow - 

On the SBH argument, j cade's examples are quite lovely and I would totally buy those. But as a general rule, as in like 99.9% of the hairs I've seen made available, even after the aforementioned two years PA's have had to play with the SBH tool, it looks like infernal poo. Aside from fur (in which case I still prefer AM's Catalyzer fur over dForce fur), I just don't like it because of what we have available to use. I've made a few enhancements to capes and bracers and whatnot (strips of fur here and there) but nothing on someone's head just because of how unwieldy the tool is. SBH or dForce Hair (not cloth dForce) is very heavy...even heavier than OOT's hair...at least on my system (32GB RAM, RYZEN 7 1800x, 1080TI). I avoid it like the plague. I could overlook the heavy system usage if we had options that looked jaw-droppingly good, but we just don't. 

lilweep

Ive never been able to make something in SBH editor that actually looks good, but it took me 10 minutes to style this from this, so surely a PA (not Phil) that actually spent time on it could make something good lmao.

Btw, i rendered these with the default Rubber shader for 5 minutes only because i couldnt be bothered to actually use dual lobe or something which takes considerably longer.

blaz

j cade said:

When tweaking, I will generally tweak PR settings but leave PS ones alone.

 

Hey, can you tell me why you tweak PR settings. The thing is I noticed that a lot of strand based hair clip through the body after simulating them. Now, after learning the meaning of PR and PS I'm thinking it's because the PR settings get applied after simulation. I haven't tested this yet though.

 

And one more request. Would you be willing to share a simple shader for strand based hair. I think a lot of PA's hair just suffer from bad shaders.

 

Thank you

jeannny

blaz said:

j cade said:

When tweaking, I will generally tweak PR settings but leave PS ones alone.

 

Hey, can you tell me why you tweak PR settings. The thing is I noticed that a lot of strand based hair clip through the body after simulating them. Now, after learning the meaning of PR and PS I'm thinking it's because the PR settings get applied after simulation. I haven't tested this yet though.

 

And one more request. Would you be willing to share a simple shader for strand based hair. I think a lot of PA's hair just suffer from bad shaders.

 

Thank you

I am having the same trouble with hair being occulded by the figures body when subdivisions are set higher than 0 or Base. The hair doesn't 'fit' to the higher resolution morphs, so is there any way to correct this?

chevybabe25

I think I understand what you are saying. Check the parameters tab for the figure and make sure that both viewport and render subd are set to the same number. Theres some kind of weird bug.