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Hope people find this useful for their projects this month.
What is your favorite freebie Carrara dynamic hair on the web?
Marcelo has some at sharecg http://www.sharecg.com/v/24144/browse/5/3D-Model/Long-dynamic-hair-for-Carrara-6
Jonstark has a couple as well.
His hair on sharecg (with another in his gallery)
http://www.sharecg.com/v/79903/gallery/5/3D-Model/Basic-Dynamic-Hair-for-Animation-Testing
@diomede, thanks much for sharing your lessons! When I can't keep up (real life, etc.), I save all the pointers, and this is precious!
cheers to all who've shared - we lurkers are absorbing as much as we can get to!
--ms
(edit to remove redundant mention of Jonstark's great videos)
Hey, i'm finding this very helpful. however, i'm a deaf dude and i'ive been using captions to understand the vids, but for some reason, p;art 6 doesn't have the CC button. So, i can't get past that...
I'd think that there would be a program to translate from audio to CC... but too often I'm wrong about a lot of things.
And where is this "more complex hair" tut?
I just checked Google and YouTube has a free app that will do just what I'd hoped... located at Free Audio to Text Using YouTube Closed Caption - Update - YouTube... it's in audio format, why the video creator didn't bother to add CC to it to help is beyond me. It is up to the video creator to add CC. I also found a YouTube help file explaining how to add CC to someones video but have been unable to find any app that auto adds CC... yet.
If someone could just e7plain the tools use in the part 6 vid, it would be good enough.
Part 6 vid starts off talking about the 'Push' tool (I actually screwed up and forgot to convert the hair before using it, which is why it jumped back up into the original position and I had to drape and convert before using the Push tool). Even though you have set an offset amount when draping, sometimes the hair seems to drape too close to the mesh, and the Push tool is excellent for nudging the hair up off the mesh by a certain small distance (which you can set and adjust according to your likes). I use the push tool all the time whenever draping, it's just an easy way of getting back to a reasonable offset after draping.
Next is the Cut tool, which basically lets you shorten the guide hairs, when no specific hair is selected, then Cut tool affects all the hairs, and I simply used it to 'trim' the hair to make it even.
But since some of the hairs were already too short to be even (they were sprouting from farther back on the head) I next demonstrated the 'Hair Length' tool to 'grow' the hair out a lot and then used the Cut tool to trim it back evenly. The hair length tool has a default setting of 0 feet, so if you use it at default it will only shrink the hair back to nothing, not grow it out, so I changed that to grow the hair out, and I also changed the radius of effect so I could do the whole head at once instead of a hair at a time. Once it was grown out, several hairs went right into the mesh (since the hair length tool doesn't care about mesh). Because you can only use the Cut tool from the tip end of the hair, as some of the hair tip ends are not visible since they are now inside the mesh of the proxy figure, I unchecked the constraint that the cut tool would only apply to visible hairs, so that I can cut back the ones inside the mesh at the same time. I cut it back, used push to get it outside the mesh again, drapied again, and used push at a lower setting, then used cut to even it up.
Next I jumped back to the assembly room to demonstrate that although my guide hairs all looked right, some of the loose hair that would render is too far away from any particular guide hair, and so it just falls wherever it falls, including right through the mesh on the front of the face, looking weird. I was going to show how to fix this, but made another mistake and my mouse wheel accidentally scrolled over the 'Segments Per Hair' box, taking it down from 30 to 1 and immediately messing up my hairstyle as every hair was only 1 unbroken segment. I then moved to correct this, I put the number of segments back up to 30, but it will still all look the same and I have no guarantee that the segments are even from each other, so I next used the 'Even Hair Segments' tool to make sure each segment is equal to each other (so that the hair will drape naturally).
Although it is an easy fix to get back to where I can drape it again, I took a moment to highlight the 'Straighten' tool which makes the hair stand up, then Brushed it back into position, then draped and used the push tool to get back to where I was at before.
I then showed how to correct the loose hair falling where it wants problem by going in to the bottom of the general tab and checking the enable autogrouping (why this is unchecked by default I'll never know).
Next I demonstrated that now the hair is all following the guide hairs as it should, so there's no more loose hairs falling through the face, but also showed that because of the small number of hairs I was using there appeared to be a very thin, nearly bald, stripe down the middle of the head. I showed the 2 ways to correct that, the 1st is to simply increase the number of hairs, which is great for still renders, but can slow rendering time and for animations might not be the most ideal solution. The next solution is to use the daz hair cap that is included with every copy of Carrara, fit it to the top of the character's head, and use the morphs to make it cover the area where the hair is growing from, and for animations the human eye can't really tell the difference, which lets you use very low numbers of hairs to get the same visual effect as a full head of hair (since the balding areas are covered) and the rendering can still fly speedily.
That's about all that's covered in that video. Hope that helps :)
The 2nd slightly more complex hairstyle tutorial is linked here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/52022/ And I think you can also find them on my youtube channel too.
BTW one final note: now that Philemot has developed the plugin to turn Carrara hair into an object that can be turned into conforming hair to be used in other programs, I believe that content creators are eventually catch on to the fact that Carrara is possibly the fastest/simplest way to make tremendously realistic looking conforming hair too, just by creating your Carrara hair and then saving it out to be turned into conforming. :)
@Jonstark you're a lifesaver! Thanks!
I have a problem. Even at 100 strength, my brush isn't doing squat. The guide hairs are up every which way, but tthe hair is diwn like it draped? Reset does nothing. I must've tripped on something...
Np, my pleasure :)
Hmm, I haven't ever run into something like that, the guide hairs up and the real hairs draped, and nothing responding? Sounds like something is very wrong, hard to diagnose that remotely. Maybe some screenshots? I freely admit by the way that I am not really an expert, just a guy who figured out a few things and thought I'd share. It may be something simple that I'm not thinking of offhand, or it may be that Carrara suddenly borked on you and you might have to get rid of it and start over. I haven't had that happen in the hair room, and in fact rarely have trouble anywhere in Carrara, but every once in a great while I'll get 'an error has occured' error message and have to crash out of the scene and restart from my last save point.
sMACK ME IN DA HEAD. I fitxed it. Had to hit clear in sim contrlols. no idea how i tripped on that.
Also, my brush wasn't doing anything because...well...imagine a flea trying to brush your hair with all its might. too small, too weak. lol
With Philemo’s dynamic hair to obj plugin, the shader styles affect the obj. Perfect for toon renders.
I have got to work on this stuff. I didn't before, because of my old and slow computer. Now I have no excuse except for no time.
this should suit :)
https://www.daz3d.com/dynamic-elderly-hair-for-v4-and-m4
I found it in my runtime - its a lot of fun :)
Definately fun !
ha ha yes, lovely beard - it's very interesting how all the hair sections are availble in one hair instance - i didnt know you could do that
Just a thought about hair and specifically about styles that you may have for older figures. Let's say you have a style for V4 and you'd really like to use it with G2F. You can't just apply it to G2F as it has a different mesh and so most likely the hair will sprout from all sorts of random body parts. So you can use Philemo's plugin to use it with the new figure - load V4 and the hair, and convert using Philemo's plugin. You now have a polygon version of that hair that you can adjust to fit any figure (most hairs will fit pretty easily unless the character has a very strange shaped head - yes, Aiko, I'm looking at you!. You just need a transmap to apply to the strips in the vertex hair - and you can even use Carrara hair to produce the transmap (white hair on a black background).
Small note - you can create simple variations on the existing styles by varying wave, kink, and, other elements in the shader. So if you have a very straight hair product, you can use Philemo’s plugin to get a straight version, but you can also apply a different shader and get a variation. Pretty cool.
And these variations can be used as morphs for the base hair model.
How about long haired V4 models floating about in zero gravity. Any Zero-G hair plugins?
If you take one of the Dynamic hairs into the model room you can experiment and get some interesting results.
Here are videos of two of my experiments with using Flow Force as a wind source for Dynamic Hair. The hair strands are on a green vertex sphere. I find using Flow Force frustrating because of it's "seemingly" buggy controls that don't do anything when you change the numbers from their initial state. Are any of you having the same troubles with Flow Force?
Carrara 8.5 - Dynamic hair in wind using Flow Force
https://vimeo.com/289222936
Carrara 8.5 - Dynamic hair in Force Flow wind - 2
https://vimeo.com/289223539
lovely hair shader
it's the perfect density
hair can make grass skirts too
did this for another thread
You can't fool us with another name change, Wendy!
"See me swish my hula butt!"
A user wants a hula skirt for DAZ studio
you might need to whip up a Dforce hair one for all figures
it could grow off a belt you can fit to any figure
Thanks - not a bad idea!
Wow
I've gone through a LOT of tests and experiments since putting up that video of tests not long ago. I do Rosie's hair entirely different now on my new machine - sort of.
The hair shader is nearly the same, just a few tweaks. The way I layer the hair is incredibly different, however, as I now feel like I've finally unlocked the door to making ultra huge curly hair... in layers!
The tests I've shown in this video was a nightmare. Not the hair, but trying to work with it (Carrara in general) on this under-powered laptop. It was horrible, but at least I was able to render some tests of curly hair with some success. It's not just curls that can mess things up (making the hair jitter, even when not moving), but any bit of waviness if the hair a really long was also doing this... or was it?
One thing I've learned when using dynamic hair in a scene is to make sure that nothing else is set to collide with hairs, even if it's nowhere near the hair. Even skydomes... well especially skydomes, I should say will cause dramatic catastrophe.
Anyway, in that video I was using custom mesh collision objects to shape the hair - very much like PhilW's face shield. It's really kinda neat how we can manipulate the hair with invisible low-poly mesh. I'm using Genesis and have tried using various things as the collision object(s), like Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD), for example, which does work but I've found that I prefer the results I get from simple low-poly shapes parented to the figure. Even better, each of these individual colliders can have different settings applied to them - friction and bounce, for example. Friction is really nice on shoulders, but it will cause hair to stick to a face shield! LOL
So I've got a nice setup of collision objects parented, but instead of shaping the hair with collision mesh, I'm using various Point Forces which are also parented to parts of the figure. To make this work for animated scenes, I used multiple hair objects on the same figure - in the same place. Light, frilly wisps kept close to the head and neck, long flows of hair down the back, and several iterations of full hair styles covering it all, each draped and simulated with different amounts of pressure from the rig of forces, so the final (outer) layer has all of the various lengths I need for the wild lion mane of hair I've ended up with.
Along with a crazy translucency kick I've been on lately, it's now taking much longer to render just Rosie by herself - but it's totally worth it. I can animate her with the hair hidden, and then drape and simulate each layer individually with the forces set for each layer, and it doesn't mess with the layers already simulated.
So now I'm saving these animates/simulated scenes several times until the test renders become real renders, then do a final save. At this point I can build a scene and bring her in when it's time to render. There's actually a lot more to this workflow than that simle description, which I'll be publishing to the web soon in a much more complete, tutorial-like method once I get the movie released. But I've been so happy with how things are going, but bummed that I can't really show it off yet - driving me nuts on that front! LOL
Dart is much easier. I've given him Mon-Chevalier hair and then used dynamic Carrara hair to make it a bit longer and dynamic. Looks cool! New Rosie looks fantastic, I think! Tiny little thing with this gigantic mop! :) Love it!!!
Hey, cheers all! I'll try and sneak a still render out to show you.
Beyond using forces we may also edit the strength and direction(s) of gravity in the physics tab.
The biggest key to getting hair to work the way you want it to is to work with it a LOT.
EDIT:
Oh... I almost forgot!
Another test I did a while back (several, actually) that worked really well, was to counter the effectes of motion force and gravity by grouping the figure with the hair, and moving the group against or with the flow of force in the scene - like downward to defy gravity, backward to defy forward motion, etc.,
The cool thing about this besides the obvious reasons of force control, is that we can also control how this all behaves a bit more with the fun use of various tweeners for the motion of the group.
Just to be a bit more clear, even the render camera is in this group, along with everything else in the scene to be rendered - so that nobody really knows why the simulation is behaving the way it is by simply viewing the video.