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I think you will find that if you change the a figure that already has hair growing on it by deleting a portion, the hair will vanish!
I think you will find that if you change the a figure that already has hair growing on it by deleting a portion, the hair will vanish!
I hadn't thought of doing it that way, but I bet you're right, change the number of polys of the figure being drawn on and the hair will no longer know where to 'be'. :) The method I was referring to involves chopping off the head first, then using the severed head section (grisly as that might section) to create ad grow the hair on thereafter.
Luckily it's a little slow and I've been able to play around to test. Forgive the quality of the hair and the animation, this is simply a very quickly put together silky longhair style that I put together on the low-poly genesis envelope's disembodied head while it was on a V4 character (the same default character from my earlier videos in fact). I added low poly proxy figures for the chest and the left and right collars, and after making sure everything looked halfway right on the V4 I got rid of the V4 and loaded up a Genesis1, specifically the M5 Heroic Genesis.
Quite a bit different in body size! But I simply moved the genesis head with the hair up until it was sitting over the M5 head, did the same with the low poly invisible chest proxy I made (I didn't end up using the collar proxies as I didn't need them for this experiment) and dropped the invisible Genesis head onto the M5 head in the instance tray, and the invisible chest on M5's chest. Ran a simulation with M5 doing the head shake, and here's how it came out. Aside from the fact I didn't retexture M5 and his eyes look like he's possessed by demons, not bad.
Seems to work fine so far, but I need to do further testing. Next up I'll try it on Genesis2female, then Genesis2 male.
Hi Jon,
I will try to do it your way tomorrow morning. I will let you know the results.
Work got busy and prevented me from experimenting the way I wanted, but I did manage to put the exact same hair on Genesis2female, works just as well (see attached).
I'll try to put together a quick tutorial (not like a real tutorial but just showing what I did to make this work) later on, and maybe put the hair on sharecg or somewhere (never done that before, so not sure what's involved), just to demonstrate the concept in action.
Hi Jon,
Working with Genesis is not easy. I wish we had a Genesis proxy similar to the V4 proxy created by PhilW. Everything fits the first time around, because it uses the "fit to" feature. Everything is automatic. (BTW, I wonder why PhilW is conspicuously absent from this thread.)
In the past week, I used to try to work with a Genesis skeleton proxy superimposed to Genesis, but got nowhere. Your idea of using only the V4 head inserted in the V4 figure hierarchy, using her own skeleton, is better. It's simpler too. But we have to fit the proxy head manually on the figure, and that's not easy. I've been working for five hours this morning and I finally came up with the following. There is some jittering I still have to get rid of. As you can see, I have no experience in rigging figures. Thanks for your help with this. You rescued me once more.
This scene is part of my next movie. It's done with Genesis figures. She's supposed to be talking. Her head and hair don't move very much, but that's enough. In the end, I wish it won't be too difficult to use Carrara's dynamic hair for all scenes of my movie.
http://youtu.be/V1DeY5kCcA0
Had a family thing last night and didn't get the chance to put this together the way I wanted, I'm hoping later tonight after work I can do a few more tests, but the concept does seem to work at so far every character I've put the hair on it works fine. I do have to move the invisible Genesis envelope head so that it's on top of the actual character head, and often some scaling of the Genesis head also needs to be done too (otherwise the carrara hair can either end up looking like it's inside the character's head or floating just above it) but while it's not a one click solution it's not like it takes a lot of fine tuning, a couple of twiddles using the translate and scale tools (and scale isn't even always needed) and you've got the invisible Genesis head in the right spot and everything looks good.
Originally I thought there would need to be a proxy for each of the collars and the shoulders and the chest (anything the hair might normally collide with) but now I'm thinking really only the chest is necessary, and have the chest piece big enough to cover the collars/shoulders, after all every which way the character moves, the chest and collars/shoulders don't really drift far from each other anyway.
I'll try to do more testing through the day to zero in on what the best approach would be to refine this, and then later tonight I'll try throw up a free hairstyle and small (5 min) pseudo-tutorial and hopefully if we get some folks willing to test it on their own characters we can see if this works as universally as it appears to work for me.
I did build one, but it didn't work well, it would shred itself in movements unfortunately, apparently the 'fit to' feature for autofit for Genesis is too dang strong and pulls it too close to the body and beyond the limits of what the low poly mesh seemed to be able to withstand. Perhaps I only did it wrong, but I couldn't get it to work right, it would just tear itself apart too much in movements, strange as that sounds. I would welcome being wrong about this, however, if someone else manages to build a conforming low-poly Genesis mesh that can function just like clothing all over the body, that would be ideal for creating Genesis-specific hairs for animation.
It also wouldn't be a 'universal' solution, it would only be a solution for Genesis (or Genesis2female or whatever) since it's also character specific.
Hey all, I might be able to help if I understand better what is missing for the genesis proxy mesh. The low-poly mesh that I put on sharecg should be able to be converted to a conforming genesis proxy, including automatically adapting to shape changes. Instructions for converting the base mesh to a conforming genesis cloth item capable of "fit to" should be here.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45361/#676987
And I put the mesh on sharecg. See here.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/79449/view/5/3D-Model/Genesis-Crude-Envelope-Mesh-for-Proxy-Hair-Sims
Let me know if that is not what you are looking for. I might be missing something.
If you cut your low proxy figure up to only leave head, shoulders, chest and back, conform it to your figure by attaching the skeleton and getting the weight-painting right, then grow hair on it, it does work. The proxy moves with the figure movements and the sim works well - just tested.
Couldn't render, because Carrara got mixed up between the VM and assembly room, showing one superimposed on the other and I had to force-quit, but before I did, I could run the sim in the assemble room and it worked well.
I suppose, if you want to distribute, you can detach the skeleton and include instructions to attach and do the weight-painting. Haven't had time to test that, but in theory it should work, because it doesn't change the vertex count.
Does this same sort of "conforming" work with Genesis? I have C8.1, so can't test.
Argus, this might be of real interest/use for you.
While I was testing, decided to change my default animation from just the head shaking from side to side, and instead put the same hairstyle I grew from the Genesis's severed head :) and put on V4 and then M5 Heroic and Genesis2female above in the thread, and put it onto M4, as seen in the animation below.
But I changed the animation from the side to side headshake to a simple walk forward cycle using some aniblocks. I immediately realized the problem you described several days ago, which is that since I have the air dampening set high (to avoid hair jitter and jumping) it also creates 'air drag' when moving forward. So while I was working on the 'universal hair prop' solution I took some time to address this issue and figure out what I think is a pretty decent and simple solution.
At first the hair was dragging back over the shoulders, which would be fine if M4 was running, but since he's only walking that seems like way too much reaction; most people with long hair when walking it hardly blows back at all, you just see it shift slightly and maybe a few strands that were on the edge of the shoulder might fall back.
At first I tried lowering the air damping percentage, and that does help, but the more I lower it, the more jittery the hair becomes, and that's the whole reason for keeping the air damping nice and high. Increasing the shape stiffness helps to keep it in place so it doesn't want to fall back over the shoulders, but if I kick that up too high the hair gets too stiff, frankly, and doesn't look 'loose and flowing' the way it should. So I kept the air damping high, introduced a tiny bit of shape stiffness (1 to 2%) and then added another force to the scene - a directional force, pointing straight down to mimic gravity wanting to keep the hair in place. The key thing about doing it this way was that I can set the scene in such a way that this directional force affects nothing at all in the scene except for the particular hair group I want it to effect (in the simulation tab in the hair model room, at the bottom, there's a forces option where you can select what scene forces will affect the hair in simulation). I haven't totally refined this, but I like the effect with a very slight straight down directional force (I set it to around .5 ft/sec strength in the directional force strength settings). You can see the hair is reacting to the movement, shifting and moving, but not so much that it's flying over the shoulder, plus I'm not having to worry about too much hair jitter. I think this is a valid technique for this, though I will need to do more testing.
Also I'm only using 2 proxy collision objects, one for the Genesis head from Diomede's excellent low poly Genesis envelope he was so generous to donate for use on sharecg.com (though I manually added a few vertexes to the top of the skull area to make it give it just a bit more polygons to be more precise with where I draw the hairline), and also the chest area (along with extrusions for the shoulders and neck) also pulled from the same proxy figure. Here's some screenshots, first of the Chest Collider object (which is simply dropped on the chest bone of whatever figure you're using) and the severed Genesis head which I create and grow the hair from (again, just drop this on head bone of whatever figure you're using) and the hair appears to work fine as a universal object.
The more I play with it, the more I'm finding I don't think I need separate collision objects for the shoulders/collars/neck, it can all be part of the chest since the chest is connected to all those areas anyway, so this makes a universal solution less complex to implement. Not a 'one click' solution, but maybe a 'two click' solution :)
Here's some screenshots, first of the chest object, then of the head object. Seems to work fine, and I can transfer the same hair from figure to figure, just do a bit of resizing and moving of the collision objects to match up with whatever character I'm putting them on.
Thanks,Jon, for the advice on how to make shoulders from Diogene's envelope and how to use the directional force. As you recommended, I also added only 2% of shape stiffness. I also added more hair guides and extra polygons around the center of the head for the hairline. But, as you can see, that did nothing for the shimmering or jitters we observe in her hair.
I think you are going in the right direction. It is left only for me to play some more with the settings, maybe with the hair or root stiffness. Or maybe is it a shader room adjustment?
I think mostly it will be shader room adjustments, possibly also some render room adjustments. I would take the highlight brightness down and possibly use a higher level of antialiasing too, since there's nothing wrong with the way the hair is moving now, it looks very natural, it's just got some sparkles which I believe is down the antialiasing settings, but also very visible because of the highlight level.
I have been doing some animation with Carrara hair which was not simulated at all and therefore should just have been static on the figure. This was true when the figure was not moving but as soon as I started to animate it, I got bad jitter of the hairs.
I traced the issue down to several of the Hair Shader parameters operating in Global Space and not related to the figure UVs as would make sense. Therefore when the figure moves, the hair is at a different point in space and picks up a different value, causing the jitter. The parameters affected are Frizz, Kink and Length Variation. Wave seems to work OK, and Clump can be used as it has a checkbox that allows you to turn on Local, which makes it use the figure parameters and not global.
There is no real work around other than to avoid using these parameters. I have submitted a Bug Report to DAZ in the hope that this may get fixed in a future version, but I thought it was worth sharing here.
Yikes, that's disappointing. :( Frizz I could do without I suppose but Kink is one of the most useful parts of the hair shader (maybe wave could still get that curled look with the right frequency and phase settings, have to continue playing and see). Thanks for alerting on this, I keep getting swamped with family stuff and ended up accomplishing almost none of what I had hoped for this past weekend. I got distracted trying to play with new Genesis1 content I picked up on the sale and feel like I wasted what little free time I had. Going to have to dive back in and get some serious playing/testing with the hair again and get back 'on track' for what I had originally hoped to get done.
Phil, are you certain about this? I haven't had time to do much testing, but I'm not seeing it so far.
Since all the shaders don't actually change the shape of the guide hairs at all, only the way the 'loose' hairs that are visible are rendered, when relying on a hair shader to get a hairstyle it does mean that the underlying sim will still behave only as the guide hairs would normally move in simulation, and for example if you've got straight guide hairs and then put a curly/kinky hair shader on them, then the movement of the visible curly hairs has to follow the movement of the straight guide hairs, which means in certain circumstances the hair will appear not to move correctly (most commonly hair appears to suddenly jolt or crawl over the shoulder instead of flowing naturally, because the hair shader has to follow the underlying guide hair's movement).
There's a tradeoff though, and a reason not to simply shape the guide hairs in the modeling room and let that be what makes hair curly/volumized, because if you don't set any shape stiffness it will all fall straight out under the influence of gravity and within a few moments of the animation the hair will have lost all curls and volume and be completely straight again. On the other hand, if we amp up the shape stiffness to preserve whatever shapes are set in modeling/brushing the guide hairs, then you've got a stiffer hairstyle that doesn't move and flow as freely/naturally as perhaps it should in the animation. I've been approaching the problem by assigning 'real' curls/volume to the guide hairs at specific points that I don't want to move much anyway (say the bangs or the bits that frame the face) along with a shape stiffness to preserve the look, and then using hair shaders on straight guide hairs in areas where I want the hair to appear to have curl/wave/volume but still have the hair flowing loosely.
Here's an example vid first of the underlying straight hairstyle, so it can be seen how the guide hairs (which have no shape stiffness at all) are moving and reacting in the scene, then on the second vid the only changes I made were to add a Kink shader to the existing hair simulation (nothing else). I also used the scale to widen the invisible low proxy head/envelope so that the volumized hair wouldn't fall through V4's cheeks, but it's running the exact same simulation I did for the straight hair (I didn't do another simulation).
The hair that I was using was a "fur" all over a Genesis character with a partial Gorilla morph. But I did a couple of tests with V4 and got the same results. I was not using any hair simulation at all, so it should just follow the character, but it was clear when animated that the shaders were being applied based on position in space and not following the character. Having said that, your example looks fine, so maybe it works in some situations and not others. Or maybe it works for everyone else but me!
I had the same experience as PhilW. In the past week, I have consecrated dozens of hours trying to make curly hair. (Completely straight hairs are not realistic). I used mostly the wave function of the shader room. While it is possible to make a 3 or 4 seconds clip without any jitters, I found it impossible to make an 8 or 10 seconds clip which I can use in a movie. That is a clip in which a person has a normal conversation. At some point, for me jitters spoil the situation. Always. Invariably. Like a virus.
Last night, after a last try, I gave up. So far, unfortunately, I have now abandoned the idea of using dynamic hairs for my next movie.
Even in your last example, Jon... I have to be honest: the girl with the curly hair, well, her curls don't follow absolutely the guide hairs. There is some discrepancy there. I see some small, but definite jitters at the tip of the hairs.
Hi Argus, actually they are exactly following the guide hairs, and this is actually the reason for the jitters at the shoulders. The guide hairs are straight and don't have curls, so move differently then they would if they were curled. The hair shader has curls/waves but has to follow the straight guide hair's movements exactly. The actual motion of the hair is exacly the same as in the animation with the straight hair, and due to the fact that I had no friction on the invisible chest collision object I was using, they slide way too easily over the shoulder. It just makes the straight hair look 'slippery' as it dances back and forth over the shoulder, but with the kinked hair shader, it means the hair has to 'jump' quickly over the shoulder in a way that isn't natural for hair movement. The jitter is exacerbated by the fact that I did only one hair simulation, the first one, where the straight hair is much closer to the face, neck, and in the second animation with the curly hair I used the exact same simulation, but used the x scale to make the invisible head proxy object even wider (I did this to try to avoid having hair fall through the face of the V4, but a side effect is it moves the actual hairs farther out towards the edge of the shoulder an even beyond, which means that the side edges of the kinked hair is jumping over empty space beyond where the actual shoulder is.
That's actually a separate and different issue/problem then what I was testing for, so I didn't care much as I wasn't going for realism in that area, which isn't so much concerned with the natural movement of the hair over the shoulders but instead I was looking at the body of the hair above, as it moves and sways to see if I could replicate the problem PhilW was describing above. I couldn't in my short animation, but when you mentioned maybe it takes a longer animation to spot it, I decided to make a 30 second animation, again just using a couple of added aniblocks to my beginning headshake pose. I didn't fine tune the hair shader and the highlights are too high, making it to shiny glowy, and the hair is too reactive to the abrupt up and down movements V4 makes during the walk cycle, making it judder slightly more than I would like, but that could be adjusted by tinkering with the scene forces and the air dampening level and again that wasn't what I was testing for. Nor did I do anything fancy as far as the hairstyle, just added a kink shader to the extremely basic hairstyle, but even in a longer animation I'm not running into the problem, seems to behave in a fairly stable fashion. Perhaps it's only a problem with short hair/fur, or perhaps I'm just lucky? Will do further testing. Also putting this hairstyle up on sharecg so others can test.
Full version of the animation at larger size: http://youtu.be/vQZHl2BuT-M
So in a perfect world I would be putting up a really complex and beautifully tuned hairstyle as my first test hair freebie, but eh... just to test the premise of whether my theory that there can be such a thing as a universal hairstyle to use with any figure, I'll just start with this very simple hairstyle with a slight kinked hair shader. I figured out how to put these up on Share cg at long last, so here's the hair and the invisible head object:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/79903/view/5/3D-Model/Basic-Dynamic-Hair-for-Animation-Testing
And here's the low poly chest collider object I've been using:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/79904/view/5/3D-Model/Carrara-Chest-Collider-for-dynamic-hair-sims
As usual I'm in the middle of my workday and just on a break, so if I've screwed these files up somehow (likely! :) ) I won't be able to correct until later in the day, please let me know if there's any errors in downloading them, etc. They should go into your objects folder in wherever your presets are (for me it's in my documents/Daz/Carrara8.5/Presets/MyObjects
I didn't put a face shield in, I figure mostly you would have that from what PhilW put up (and if not he's got it on sharecg, very generously available, or you can simply rig up your own) nor did I put up the Daz hair cap that I use to make V4 not look bald at the roots :) (for obvious reasons, but it should be included in Carrara under the hair subfolder in the objects tab).
The idea is to put the invisible low poly head object (make it visible for the purposes of placing the hair) that the hair is growing out of onto your character's head in the scene (you can easily scale it/move it so it fits over your characters head) then make sure it's dropped on the head bone of your character in the instances tab so it's parented to the character's head and will move with the character in animation.
Also do the same thing with the chest collider object, parenting it to your character's chest bone, and this gives the long hair something to collide against so it doesn't fall through the character's mesh.
The dynamic hair itself will likely come with an animation 'baked in'; the last simulation I ran before saving it to the folder. It's also all the way in the down position. Simply clear the simulation, either in the hair modeling room or in the assembly room, and I recommend going into the hair modeling room and using the 'straighten' tool to hike the hair up so that it's sitting well above the shoulders and can drape naturally into place, colliding with the 'chest collider' object. You might also want to use the 'push' tool to ensure the hair isn't starting the simulation hitting any of the mesh.
Then as long as your character and any clothing it is wearing have collisions unchecked (in the effects tab for the item, in the assembly room) you should be able to drape and simulate the hair and it should work hopefully as well (and universally) for you as it has for me.
I've never put anything up on sharecg before so hopefully I haven't screwed this up...
Jon, I don't know how you do it, but it works!
I took the hair you posted on Sharecg (a big thanks!), changed the color, and voila!
Buit 106 guide hairs?? You never went that high in your tutorials. I went maybe to 60. And density to 100000?? Wow! No wonder you get results.
You're definitely the expert. And I'm going to use this "kinked" hair in my next movie, for sure. I might modify it somewhat though.
http://youtu.be/CEj8wz9r-U4
Wow that looks awesome Argus :)
Yeah, I went very heavy on the guide hairs, not that many are needed for sure, but I've found that the more I have on the problem areas (especially for hair that might pass back and forth over the shoulders) the more natural it looks, and since the simulation time wasn't that bad anyway, I just amped it up a little more than I usually do in the guide hair count.
I'm so happy it's working right for you!
Also I'm happy to see that the files came across ok and were useable as is, I didn't know if that would work, and looks like it works ok on another figure, which is what I was hoping to test.
It's not a very complex hairstyle, actually it's embarrassingly simple, and I hope in the weeks to come to start putting out a collection of more complex hairs for free use, mostly I was hoping that the platform would work to put hair on any figure.
May I ask is that a V4 or Genesis or something else that you're using?
Also was it difficult to figure out how to put the proxy chest and head in place? Even though it's a fairly simple process I wasn't sure my explanations were adequate, I was thinking I should put together a short (maybe 5 min) tutorial so that new users can figure out how to use these hairs (once I make some more of them) easily.
:) I love the animation, looks great!
I used Genesis. More precisely, it is Victoria 5 to which, of course, I added morphs.
Also, I had no problems with the chest collider. It is very nicely sculpted. The shoulders were a bit high for my particular figure, so I used the "edit vertex object" feature in the assembly room and, with soft selection clicked, I rotated them down a bit.
The only thing I need to adjust is the hairline. I think I may have to add some polygons to the head there to make it straighter.
Something happened, Jon. I tried another scene with your "kinked" hair and the jitters are back, near the root this time. I tried different takes, and they won't go away. In the previous scene where I used the same hair, the lighting was different. Maybe that's why the jitters almost don't show there.
It's a shame, because the hair otherwise moves so nice. I don't understand why it works for you and not for me, or for PhilW.
http://youtu.be/0JYGBMgxYyU
Can't view the link Argus, it's showing as a private video. I don't understand why it would behave differently in another scene either.
Though bear in mind that volumetric light effects will mess up dynamic hair; if you've got a scene with volumetric lighting you'd need to run a separate hair pass with the volumetrics turned off and put them together afterwards. I doubt that's the problem though, from what you're describing...
A better guess is that the hairstyle I created is already 'down' by default, don't forget to use the straighten tool to raise it back up off the mesh, and the push tool to make sure there's no hair starting the simulation already inside of the mesh area, and then let it drape down naturally, otherwise you can get hair trapped inside of mesh and not know where to go, can go a bit crazy in sims.
Edit: Also, I've found when taking the hair from one scene to another, that it's really easy to forget to uncheck collisions of stuff in the new scene. Particularly the haircap, it's really easy to add a new haircap to the new scene and forget that collisions should be unchecked, and then I wind up with hair colliding with and even passing/growing through a haircap, which can make sims slower and the hair do very strange things.
I'll be damned! I thought the haircap "collide with hairs" function was supposed to be clicked. I guess not. So I unclicked it. And now I got a smooth video... it works! Thanks for your help. Good thing I got a mentor like you.
Sorry about the last clip. I had forgotten to click "publish". Now that link works.
Here's the new corrected clip: http://youtu.be/KKvLDfGd_eE
Cool, glad it helped! :) Another thing I often forget is to hit the 'clear simulation' before running the new simulation, even need to remember to do this for the 1st simulation after loading the hair since the hair has a simulation that I ran before saving it already 'baked in'.