2nd Tutorial: Creating and animating a (slightly) more complex Carrara Hairstyle
Jonstark
Posts: 2,738
Here's a 2nd tutorial, slightly longer than the first, which explores creating a slightly more complex hairstyle and goes deeper into the use of the hair room tools and hair shaders to demonstrate making a hairstyle which has volume (curls, waves, etc) and also retains it's shape while still giving quick animations for realistic movement. Here's the teaser animation of the style developed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3PgxGv7-rc
This tutorial follows along from the first tutorial, which is for a more basic hairstyle, and if you missed that one I recommend watching it first. You can find it here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/51604/
And an animation example of the hairstyle developed in the first tutorial is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsz65nEkq5U
The goal is by the end of the two tutorials anyone can have a comfort level and understanding of pretty much all the tools in the hair modeling and shader rooms, and can quickly and easily put together nearly any hairstyle you like, which will also render extremely quickly. This 2nd tutorial is longer than the first by a little bit, but in actual practice you should be able to create this hair from scratch in about 8 to 10 minutes, and render time probably not much more than that too (it's not all that complex or precise). I apologize if I drone on in the vids, I wanted to make sure I was taking enough time to give full explanations as I went.
I am thinking of doing one last tutorial for an even more complex hairstyle, but if I do it will be a pretty short tutorial since I've really covered all the tools and most of the approaches in these first 2 sections, and there won't be nearly as much need to stop and give explanations :) I'm really enjoying playing with Carrara hair.
Also hopefully soon I'll be able to start posting a few hairstyles for free use of the community, hopefully for use on any figure/character (got to test and get the kinks out first, to make sure they can be used with any figure without problems).
Here are the links to the 2nd tutorial:
Part 1, Other Tools:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yVOdIzN9o
Part 2, Hair Shader Room:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd7FikvX6b8
Part 3, Shaping the Hair:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVr-V71gPvU
Part 4, Additional Tool Notes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-YOPgbXObo
Part 5, Hair Groups:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dEscEN1n1s
Part 6, Styling the Hair:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjNx48KoSWU
Part 7, Animation, Corrections, and Final Notes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocZy878lVJo
Hope it's of use for everyone :)
Note: I also may have unintentionally name-checked Dart, Diomede and others as I rambled on, and I distinctly remember co-opting Cripeman's 'Kapow'... apologies in advance, didn't even realize I did so until after they were done and rewatching them to make sure I hadn't butchered the vids too badly :)
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
Kapow? I love it but you might have to pay royalties. Won't be able to watch these for a little while but wanted to thank you for your continued leadership on this.
These are great tutorials JonStark! You explain everything very well and speak clearly and I also enjoyed the background info and occasional funny lines like the girlfriend you had that actually liked having her hair pulled:) .... you kind of remind me of the BlackSmith3D guy on his tutorials the way you can talk so long and your passion and knowledge of your subject shows thru. Good job and a great resource. I had done an early tutorial set a couple of years ago on the Carrara hair by I think David Bremmer so that helped ground me even though I had forgotten most of it. I have Phil's tutorials too and watched a few but haven't dived into them as I seem to bounce around from Poser, Daz Studio, and sometimes Carrara.
A couple of questions
1. It looked like you never increase the segments of your guide hairs from 4 even though your generated hair you set to around 30-35 segments... but the guide hairs still seem to curve well.... how is that?
2. I understand why you have the low poly proxy models for collision detection for the hair... but why do you grow the hair on them... why not on the skull cap itself? That way you wouldn't have to guess about where the ear is etc. and could take advantage of morphs in the skull cap.
3. What screen capture software did you decide to use? It looks and sounds great.
Thanks again for doing these.
Thank you MrPoser, I appreciate the feedback, and actually great questions, made me realize that was one of the things I meant to mention in both videos that I totally spaced and forgot about while I was rambling.
I don't really know why there are 2 different sections where you can change the segment count (both the regular hairs and the guide hairs) since whatever you set at the highest count for one will also be what the other adopts for he hair count. At first I thought it might be a neat 'sim cheat' to set the guide hairs low for purposes of draping, then in the render the regular hairs with a higher segment count would have a nice curve even if the guide hairs were a bit blocky, but quickly discovered it didn't work that way. So I got into the (possibly bad) habit of just increasing the segment count on the first field (for regular hairs) rather than scrolling down to the guide hair section for that. I really meant to say something about this too, but totally forgot.
I very strongly considered the idea of growing the hairs on the haircap prop too, and there is some precedent for this as a few of the vendors in the daz story sell hair grown on a cap as well. The reason I ended up choosing not to is the haircap at it's default, which is what you would be drawing on in the hair modeling room, isn't quite big enough to cover all the areas I might want to draw on for the head, also I actually found that even with a blank oval I still preferred to see the whole head dimensions when drawing the hair rather than just the bits covered by the hair cap. And lastly the haircap doesn't really fit the head of an specific character, there are places where it is inside the head (usually on the sides and temples when I'm dialing things around) and other places where it bubbles up higher than the head mesh. You can jiggle it around with morphs and scaling, but it's not an exact fit (well neither is the proxy figure for that matter, so I guess that's not a very good reason not to go with it). With the proxy figure, you sort of *know* it's not going to fit exactly right, and so there's an inbuilt impetus to get into the modeling room and push/pull some polygons, but with a haircap I might take for granted it will sit just right and forget to push it into shape. Also, if I need the proxy figure for the hair to collide against anyway, so it will be in the scene, I just figured even with a low poly haircap I'm still adding a few polys to the calculations for collision, whereas if I'm not growing hair on it I can turn off the 'collide against' for the haircap and make sims just that little bit faster (plus if there's some intersecting polygons between the haircap and the proxy mesh, I figure that even though both are low-poly that still might give the hair sims a bit to think about and could lead to slightly random small effects too).
But bottom line, a haircap can and will look fine to grow hair on too.
I ended up picking up one of the first screencast softwares I stumbled across, called Screencast O Matic. They offer a free version as long as you keep it within 15 minutes, and I though 'hey surely I would never drone on for longer than 15 minutes'. So I downloaded and started using it, and immediately realized I tend to talk for longer than 15 minutes every time, but the upgrade to 'pro' paid version was cheap and I had already learned how to use it, so... they got me (well done you marketing tricksters :) ). My main rendering laptop doesn't have a microphone jack though, which I never realized before this, and the first time I played myself back it would jump between inaudible to an assault on the ears. So I installed the software on my work laptop too, and plugged my headphone/microphone into that, and had to run the screencapture on my rendering laptop and the audio on my other laptop, and then match the audio to the video after the fact by exporting as a wav file, and importing in. The software made that part pretty easy, but it was quite comical with me trying to get the two laptops to start the recording at the same time, 2 mouses hovered over the record button and trying to press them both at the same time (my left hand is not mouse-trained very well, as I discovered!) and then I would concentrate so hard on doing that that I would totally forget what I was going to say, curse randomly, restart and try again, and again... :)
Thanks for your perseverance, Jonstark. You said you were going to make a second tutorial and, true to your word, you did. It is just as good, if not better, than the first one. Here one has everything to make complex animated dynamic hair, with a reasonable render time. You are a winner.
You've showed us what Carrara can do with hair. And some people say Carrara is behind the times... I don't think so.
Thanks Argus! :)
The more I play, the more I learn. After a thread in the Commons mentioned the hair from the digital film Brave and gave a screenshot of how densely it was packed with curved guide hairs, I couldn't resist playing around to see if I could achieve a similar messy/curly/big hair effect in Carrara. Results were mixed, very easy to get a hairstyle like that for still renders but still playing around to try to find simulation settings that will work to give natural movement in animations. Haven't had much time this weekend to play as much as I'd like though...
Got to stop playing around with random things and do some work fine tuning and testing to make sure the 'one proxy for use of all possible figures' idea will work; when I can confirm that, then I'll start putting out some free hairsets for use of the community on any figure.
So anyways, now that I have my new Rosie character made from G2F, and being quite happy with her setup, it's time to try my hand, once again, at some wonderful dynamic hair for her. Before I just start fumbling around making the same old mistakes, I've decided to go through the Jonstark Course of Carrara Dynamic Hair 101 and 102 from start to finish. Before doing so, I recall being told that my playlist (which only had course 101) was incomplete, and that there was still a second half!
So I've followed the link to what I was missing, and added them all to the YouTube playlist I've made, so that we can watch the entire Jon Stark's Carrara Dynamic Hair Course Videos from start to finish, without having to select each video individually!
Thanks again, Jonstark! Wish me luck?
Good luck Dart!
Btw, I've got to burn some PTO off or lose it, so I've got nearly all of next week off, and item #1 is getting some work done on hairstyles, and the next main hairstyle I want to tackle is something super curly/bouncy, a style like the girl from Disney's 'Brave', so hopefully I'll be able to put something very similar up soon too. :)
Oh man! That is exactly what I need for this character... exactly!
Okay, an important tip to those of you whom might follow this course.
This relates to Jonstark fitting the V4 Proxy figure to his custom character, the second tutorial in the playlist:
Instead of actually going into the model room, click the little wrench icon in the upper left of the interface, to enter "Edit Mode". This icon is visible anytime you select a model which can be edited in the model room, so make the same selection on the model which he uses to enter the model room.
However, by entering "Edit Mode" in the Assembly room, the model selected is now a wire-frame mesh and the interface options switch to exactly the same as if you were in the model room. While in this mode, nothing except the parts of the mesh may be selected. So even though the rest of the scene remains, we can only select polygons, edges, or vertices! In other words, we may select any of those things through other models visible in the scene, as if they weren't there. It's basically the same thing as being in the model room, but instead of having to watch yourself work through that tiny window preview down on the bottom right. Way Fun!!!
+1 to the above from Dart. I do pretty much all my poly pulling/pushing in the assembly room now, much much easier to see what is going on and get a more precise 'fit'. Couple of months back, I wasn't as familiar with the modeling options in the assembly room, so I'm pretty sure I demonstrated the pushing/pulling in the modeling room instead, but I find it much easier to model in the assembly room :)
Awesome!
I've just watched the whole first tutorial seven-part series, mostly last night to finish up this morning (work called off due to weather), followed by the Hair Segments follow-up. Nice. I'm going to try an idea of making a nice, custom conforming shape for my hair to follow on Genesis 2 F that will cater nicely to the hairline, edge-selection-wise, as well as to create the way I want the hair to rest upon and flow over, also only having mesh only where it's needed. Then take that new mesh and bring it into DAZ Studio and turn it into a Genesis 2 Female conforming item. This will make it easier to paint the grow region at various hairlines, because the edges of the mesh will actually follow hairlines for various ideas of how I need to create hair sets for different people. Then I will use the Genesis 2 Cross-Figure Resource Kit to create another one for G2 Males, as demonstrated by Josh Darling in this tutorial.
Anyways, I wanted to watch your entire course before I even begin my new hair style for Rosie, which I'll document my progress here as I go. I've just watched the first part of your Second Tutorial and am excited to finish this course! I cannot thank you enough for demonstrating all of your findings of how to really make this system tick. What a fantastic way to learn how to create real hair for all of our characters! Thank you!
Throughout the course, I know that I'm not alone in noticing the beautiful "Cognito" logo and interface on your system. Any plans on doing a similar series on the use of that? Man, just seeing that throughout your interface surfing really gets my mind going towards having the motion of one thing control the response of another, which leads me to the realization that I own Fenric's ERC for Carrara plugin, which is all about having one object control another. Hmmm... looks like I have a lot of exploring to do now... having recollections of all of the blissful additions I've (and my buddy, Kakman) have made to my Carrara Pro! I'm going to try and video-document more of the cool trinkets of knowledge I've gained about using some of these enormous gifts that a purchase of Carrara adds to one's life.
I really like your style of explaining on video and would love to see you do more for any topic you find that you'd like to share - anything. There's so much in Carrara to explore, I guess all of us do it in different ways as different parts of the interface spark our imaginations in different strengths. Like a particular setting that I might think does something that I don't want might be mostly ignored throughout my entire experience. But to 'see' someone else use it to great affect might show me that I should have been sliding that slider all along - I just never realized it because, by now, my ignorance has blocked the thing from my perception until, that is, when someone like you comes along and 'shows' me what it really does.
Typing, like this, within these pages has been a delight for me a year or so ago. Back when I began my epic thread. I still love doing that, and will continue to do so soon. It feels like forever, my recent times of not even being able to power on my workstation. Work, sleep. Work, sleep. etc., I made a proposition to my new employer as I presented my resume which I've designed around actually making Carrara (and Howler) a significant part of my work week. It's incredible. He was impressed and I've just started my new career doing what I've educated myself in for nearly thirty years now - landscaping. I'm fortunate enough to be quite famous around this whole area for artistic, high-quality work - especially when it comes to custom, dry-laid stone of any kind. I love stone. Lifting it, cutting it, chiseling it, fitting it artistically, naturally or more formal... makes no difference. I absorb your vision and sculpt it before your eyes... it a blast! Just the feel of heavy stone in my hands makes me feel alive and full of inspiration. So combining that with this is a new endeavor entirely. So I'm brand new at my new life. The Rosie character that I'm finishing now will become an integral part of the whole thing. So she has to be just right - a perfect place to start. So... back to the Hair Tutorial 2 and get this stuff worked out!
Very nice! Just finished the whole series. Quick note:
Genesis 2 users -
I'd imagine that it's somewhere in your Product Library of your DAZ account, I use DIM, so I just have it - DAZ 3D includes in the Genesis 2 Female and Genesis 2 Male "Hair" (People > Genesis 2 > Hair) library, a "Carrara Hair Cap".
With this tool, which you simply conform to Genesis 2, you just grow hair on the whole thing unless you need to paint specific regions.
I'm hoping that I can resolve whatever issue it was that Jonstark mentions regarding G2 conforming proxies. We'll see.
I've tried a couple of quick attempts at a conforming proxy for G2F to no avail. Like Jonstark mentions in his report, the system tends to draw the item too close to the figure in the fit-to process, which would work fine with a little work on the appropriate offset on the hair collisions, but I wanted to try something else before I got too carried away. After all... time is of the essence, right?
Through this whole thing, I finally remembered what my friend 3D LUST mentioned: "Grow the hair onto primitive spheres, and only collide them onto primitive spheres. Hmmm... the gears began to turn. But before I get into that, I'd like to mention that, as I was trying the G2F proxy idea, I turned off the Render-time SubD smoothing on my character and all of her clothes - in case it somehow made a difference to hair, and tried using dynamic Hair directly onto G2F, and it does work. But it truly is far too much information for the system to have to calculate for my tastes, being into animation. One of the proxies I made went like this: I selected a nice, smooth line of edges below the ribcage of an G2F figure which I've removed from the skeleton and then deleted that loop of polygons and everything below it. Then I've proceeded to select-by, choosing everything that wasn't a necessary collision polygon, like eyelashes, everything inside the mouth, the eyes and all of their parts, etc., I left the face intact, though I wouldn't have to, but it was already low enough count in my opinion. I then took that into DS and turned it into conforming clothes. It works, but I wanted to go for something that doesn't carry the weight of that rig around with it. That's where the conversation with 3D LUST came back to me.
So I brought in a primitive sphere and shaped in to the cranium of my figure. When I went to grow hair onto it, I was amazed at how many polygons are in a primitive sphere! But they work really well for native Carrara calculations, so I didn't mess with it. Then I kept duplicating it, moving it, reshaping to the one, and dropping them onto the appropriate bone to parent them to the figure. Head, collars, shoulders, pecs, chest, abs, and hip. I have three spheres making up the shape of the head in addition to the top one that sports the hair, one of which is a less obstructive face shield, one for the neck, two for each shoulder, two for the chest, one for each pec, collar, abdomen, and hip.
I know that a nine minute animation is too long for a quick simulation test, and I should have given in to my knowing better. I saw that the guide hairs where doing their thing in the simulation, and the hair appeared to be moving okay during the scrub-through, but the hair was not animated at all in the actual render. I'm not sure if it was due to the kink shader? Not sure of anything right now, so I'm rendering it now without the kink shader. Tomorrow I'll make more appropriate tests, as Jonstark suggests! LOL ...and I'll also post some videos. Here's an image of how far I've got. The center is the fitted V4 hair cap, which I've now decided that I won't need. The left is with the kink, and the right is without. The one on the right looks a lot like how she looks when she straightens her hair anyways, so I might just tweak that one a bit and use that if the kink gives me too much trouble. I have a feeling that it's not the kink, though, and that I'm just missing something simple. We'll see.
To get the style right, I ended up making great use of the length and thickness controls of the shader. The hair actually goes down to her waist and completely covers her eyes in these pictures, but I have the tip thickness set really low - 0.00 I think, and the length variation set to 100% with the length set to 97%. For the Kink shader, I have the hair collision offset set to a whopping 0.7, which also gives the proper rise from the scalp that I want.
EDIT: I wanted to stay away from using the curl tool in the hair room because I don't want the movement to be so restricted by the shape parameter.
I see what you mean when you've said htat these things become so easy and fast to put together that you can do them in minutes. It sure doesn't take long to get used to. So when it comes to noticing how I wished that I'd have done something differently with my guide hairs (LOL - like not adding 537 million of them!) it's so much easier to just delete the Hair primitive and start over. Then I jst re-select the shader that I like - unless I feel like making a new one of those too!
Okay, so I've gotten rid of the spheres. Icky. It was really taking some time to simulate, so I figured that there should probably be a better way. Yes... I can very easily go back to V4. The Rosie 4 character is getting bored with me getting used to using Genesis 2 Female, and I have Phil's proxy figure for V4 right there in my browser within easy reach. I even started reshaping his proxy to G2F when I came up with a much better plan - I think. You see, this time I wasn't going to bring it into DS, but try (for the very first time - ever) to use Wendy's "Follow Skeleton" technique, which is basically Carrara's native means of conforming models to one another if one of them is rigged.
I didn't get very far when I remembered your (Jonstark) mentioning of wanting to just make a Proxy Head and just parent it - for use of distributing hair and whatnot. Well the one that I've made is specific to Rosie 6's custom head shape, which is far from a G2F base. If nobody beats me to it, I'd be happy to make you a setup like mine which fits the generic shapes of Genesis and Genesis 2 figures - but not really soon. Besides, I think that it's best for the individual to make their own, because we all have our own needs for different hair styles - and the underlying proxy can really help us in our drapes/simulations.
Here's a screen grab of my first proxy head with the whole growth region selected (green). The other picture is of my latest version of Rosie 6: larger eyes, longer eyelashes, more tweaks on the iris-glow light rig (with sss pupils!) and my first working set of dynamic hair - at the lowest hair-count that I use, which is for simulations. Then I crank it up for the render. Today was the first time I got a chance to play with the amazing new selection/editing box in the graph editor! Oh man, is that thing nice! I imported a martial arts combo onto R6 and, like V4, her arms need a touch of adjustment here and there to keep the forearms from poking into the torso. i just grabbed the Z axis rotation of each shoulder which is a quick and easy way to fix it. But the new selection box thing in the editor: drag a selection and a light, dotted box appears around your selection. Now we can just drag the edges of the box around to resample the selection - even drag far enough to invert their amplitudes! I love it and is it ever fast!
Anyways, my biggest problem with dynamic hair so far is that it just doesn't hold up to really heavy motions - like those I've been trying to use. I still haven't done one with just the head turn! LOL But I need mine to work with these actions, so that's what I'll keep trying to achieve. Here's a bummer: the collision offset doesn't seem to apply to the grow region. At least that's what I've observed today. But I've been finding that, if I stick closer to Jonstark's advice and suggested values, it works really well. I just don't quite get the overall thickness of my Rosie's hair. Nonetheless, it IS beautiful hair!
Really great work Dart! I'm very impressed with the quality too. I've been super busy last couple of days but looking forward to tomorrow and the week to come because I'll have some real time to play and hopefully scratch something together.
One thought occurs (about the volume you wanted more filled) is separate layers of hair groups, building out one that's has a stiffer hair shape set and which sits above your 'looser' and more flowing hair. Would give you more 'puff out/stick out' volume while retaining the same shader and blend together with the lower group, which would flow nicely.
In fact if you want to get even more drastic you could simply have two different low poly hair primitives on the same head, making one bigger than the other, run the 2 simulations separately of course but they will render together in the end, and again you should have larger volume covered but if the same shader is set for the hair it should blend very nicely (though almost certainly there will be some intersection/pass through of the hairs to each other I don't imagine it will be all that noticeable). This is just speculation though; I haven't tested this out to see so I could be talking out of my... :)
That's some very good looking hair though, and it's been very interesting to follow your approach and process :)
LOL! You mean follow "your" approach!!! ;)
Thank's for the compliments :)
I didn't know that I could run multiple actual simulations on different hair pieces. Oh... that will work very nicely!
The think is, it looks really funny to have any Shape resistance during high-action motions. I'm better off with figure hair than that - at least it remains with its respective body part until I morph it away. But having a second hair beyond the hairline could very well be the sectret I've been needing all along! Oh yeah!
Oh... and about the primitive sphere idea:
All of the primitive spheres can be saved and retrieved just fine. But the one with the hair grown onto it, plus the hair itself, is indiscernible to Carrara on load, and so it replaces them each with a simple cube. Well... and a warning telling us that's what was going to happen. Just an FYI to be aware of.
Hmmm... I must say that I certainly like Rosie's eyes better the way they were. I'm changing them back.
Too bad I won't be able to try this tonight, but I had a premonition about this today at work:
Instead of the outer layer, I'll make an inner short layer that just covers the head's grow region in the overall shape that I'm looking for, and set that to snap back into shape, yet having some motion as well, and let all of my other layers flow through and around it.
I was wondering... what if that Density setting has something to do with how each layer interacts with another. Like: higher density layer might deflect lower density layers without letting them pass right on by, as what normally happens? Hmmm...
In any case, I'm really having fun using four or five layers for different effects... this is really nice to work with now that I know about the damping and other findings you've reported. Very cool!
For the darker hair like above, I've found it much easier to simply multiply my colors by a value and set the value accordingly. This stuff is really sensitive to light, which is a dream for me. I've tried many, many various shader techniques to get that effect on the conforming hairs I have been using without much luck. This fiber hair looks fantastic, is incredibly easy to light, and can render much faster than my trans-mapped conforming hair.
My next try might just get me to the shape of hair closer to what we're used to seeing on Rosie 4. I plan to try your ideas to get there:
The stiffer shape layer mentioned earlier with hair flowing in layers with it. Then make a hair kit that can be simulated along with that - but here's the rub: Hairs collide with one another, and I think that this also applies to hairs from other hair primitives. So if I simulate the underside one while the outer one is in place, the non-simulated set will add strange behaviors to the the simulation - at least I think that's happening. So I'm planning to have the initial set draped and ready for animation, even if it's not 'converted' to stay down - as long as it's draped the way it normally would be in a zero pose (mine with the arms in the down position) and then build the next set over that one and save it to the browser so I can get rid of it during the initial simulation. Then bring it in and calculate the final sim after that one is complete. I'm thinking that this will give me the effect I really want for this very special person - even perhaps better than I've ever really hoped to get... but we'll see. I was actually considering trying something like mixing both conforming figure hair along with dynamic. But then your idea about having a stiff layer rang in my mind. That is still dynamic against other hair, I think, which is far superior to that conforming/dyno-hair mix I was contemplating. Again... we'll see.
I had several days off this week to play around... but then life came and walloped me and I had less free time then I expected. It had been a while since I had done any new hair styling/modeling, so I was a little nervous. I know I'm not very expert at any kind of modeling, certainly no way would I call myself an expert on this stuff, just a dabbler who got lucky a few times. I hope to tackle (and hopefully prevail) a super curly hairstyle ala the redhead from Brave, but I know it might be more difficult/complex, so I thought I would 'warm up' with a less complex hairstyle first, and also wanted to do a 'short' hairstyle, something for the guys.
Anyway, there was a thread in the Commons which mentioned the old M3 Wedge hairstyle, and I had forgotten about this hair, and I always kind of liked it, sort of a messy surfer style, but also kind of symmetrical (split down the middle). So I thought, what the heck I'll give it a crack. And I decided in advance that good, bad, or ugly I would post the results of my attempt, even if it turned out to be an abject failure.
Well, it's not identical, by any stretch, but I actually ended up with a hairstyle I really liked after a bit of tinkering. It looks to me like Jaime Lannister's hairstyle before he was captured (season1 of Game of Thrones) so I'm tentatively titling it 'Jaime' hair :) Wait, don't want to get sued, so scratch that... 'Jamie' hair, instead? :)
First render is the old Wedge prop hair on an M3, for reference. The next 2 renders are the hairstyle I created in emulation. Of course this is built on the low poly head object that Diomede was awesome to donate for community use (it's just invisible) so this hairstyle can be put on any character. Don't know how much interest there is in it, but hopefully in a day or 2 I'll be able to put it up on Sharecg for community use (it's the middle of the night for me currently, so no time to do it right now).
I built the hair first without even thinking of the dynamics of animating it. It's a shorter hairstyle so there wouldn't be huge movement but there still should be some, and I (re) learned an important lesson, which is that gravity will always make your hairstyle 'fall' lower and looser than where you first set it, even with a high shape stiffness setting. So I should have modeled the hair to be taller/higher by default, so that when I animated it and the scene forces hit, it would fall right into place.
Don't have excellent settings yet for a shorter hairstyle as far as the dynamics go, but very high shape setting seems to preserve the general 'look' of the hair that I like, and since it's shorter it shouldn't move a lot anyway. Here's my quick test animation with a few light wind forces at the end. Not perfect by any stretch, but actually shows the hairstyle off better from multiple angles and in motion.
Oh, oh, oh... I like that male hairstyle.
These hair styles done directly on the head are great, but what is the general experience with using hair caps that can be ported from one character to another? Here I've made a hair style on a hair cap and then parented it to a genesis 2 V6 character and a genesis Aiko character.
Grateful for any tips and suggestions on the hair.
In my opinion, doing it on a separate object is the only way to fly, and far far superior. Real life has swallowed a bunch of my time, so it's been a little while since I had some time to play and come up with new hairstyles (plus I'm lazy lol) but nowadays I always always build my dynamic hairsyles on the low poly head object which I took from the low poly genesis shape you generously donated to the community at large on sharecg. It's really super easy to put the hairstyle on any character I choose, simply a matter of putting the low poly head on the head of the character (maybe pushing/pulling a few vertexes with soft-select to make it match the shape more exactly), then raise the hair up enough so it isn't colliding with any mesh and run the sim so it falls naturally into place. Sims are way faster this way than building the hair directly on a high poly character anyway (providing you uncheck the 'collide with hairs' on everything in the scene but the low poly objects your hair is built on) and the flexibility of using a hairstyle you built with literally any figure, anytime, anywhere is just awesome.
BTW that is a truly beautiful (and highly realistic) hairstyle, definitely a real-world style and would certainly be up to scratch to sell in the marketplace if you so chose (at least imo). I very much like the subtle waves in just the right places (I'm thinking wave shader, but maybe I'm wrong and it's a highly-tuned kink shader) . Stellar work, imo. The only drawback to modeling it onto the hair cap instead of a whole head shape low poly figure is if you're doing sims you risk the hair falling into the face (not just in front of, but inside the mesh) in an extreme movement, unless you have another low poly invisible 'face blocker'. But your render illustrates beautifully how you can use the same hairstyle any any character you choose (for a more extreme comparison you could just as easily slap it onto Freak 5 or the Genesis Baby and it would work just as well)
Thanks for the tips, Jonstark. I had dug out these old hair threads because of an idea I had for the Room with a View challenge - Rapunzel! If you check that thread, you will see that I had trouble recovering my hair object after I had saved the file and exited. Next time I opened the file, Carrara replaced the hair object with a cube - has that happened to you?
Hmm that's never happened to me, what a strange result. I'm not sure how that happened, I've saved hundreds of scenes with various hairstyles, always was able to open them back up and everything was exactly like I left it. I also tend to pull the object I built the hair on into the objects tab, so the hairstyle is saved there too. Every once in a blue moon a hairstyle object I've saved in the object tab will be slightly askew when I load it into a new scene, in the sense that a few of the guide hairs will be sticking off in random directions, but I can always sort that fairly easlly by brush the hair up out of any mesh and then running another hair simulation (which I always do a hair sim anyway to let the hair fall naturally in whatever new scene its in, so it isn't really any time loss hardship).
I saw the Rapunzel in the other thread by the way and thought it was a wonderfully done and funny concept, looked very good too. The tougest part I imagine was getting David5's hands to look like they were grabbing the hair, I'm guessing maybe a low poly half-cylinder where his hand would be so the hair could naturally fall down into place during a sim (I tend to immediately start doing mental exercises of how to achieve a dynamic hair effect when I see scenes like that lol).
Sorry I don't have a better answer for you on why that happened, though at this point I've probably saved out hundreds of scenes I've never run into anything quite like that.