Strand based hair. It aint easy
daveso
Posts: 7,027
in The Commons
I've dabbled with the strand based hair editor over the years, each time forgetting about it as nothing looks even remotely decent. It blows my mind the qualkity of the hairs being sold here that are strand based. Its mind boggling actually.
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At least you gave it a shot, that is more than I have done, LOL.
I am so looking forward to the new hair process from Chevybabe25 in the commercial forum. It looks fantastic
I only use it to make fur accents for armor/clothing.
I have tried but I don't like the way it works styling wise although it's so-so functional with enough practice, It can't do fine-tuned. You can get stuff that is decent with repeated tries, and if you do it often enough eventually get somewhat fast at it even. Animal furs are decent enough looking and easy enough to make without a lot of practivce. I have never figured out how to do multi-colored furs though. I think it has to be coverted to dforce hair to do that. A disappointment.
Yes, that hair got me to try it again. I'm not even close enough to save the project
. Actually, the last run, DS just crashed and burned on me as I tried to comb something.
I made some notes about using Strand Based Hair Editor here
Daz3d PAs do not need to make hairs in SBH Editor as they can import curves, apparently.
probably an entire different game then. No fair,
It is unfair (being able to import curves being the least of it). But that doesn't necessarily mean the SBH Editor cannot be used, especially for basic hairstyles, and even more especially for short hairstyles.
If your hairs are looking bad or becoming difficult to style, it could be because:
I mention these concepts in that document i linked.
I've made a bunch of hairs and furs using strand based editor.
While I have other options, as a PA, there are plenty of times this works quite decently. I mean, I DO convert it to dForce Hair because it does make things easier, but you can get a lot done with out it.
And no, color mapping doesn't require dForce Hair. If you plug a color map into the color maps of the hair, it will create multicolored hair just fine.
I didn't read the thread SUPER closely, but I didn't get the impression that anything she discussed would make it easier for us to create SBH; it just makes using and rendering dForce hair less resource-intensive.
It was quite cryptic to read, but from what I understood the showcased hairstyle was using:
1. Iray curves, allowing for denser hairstyles (we already had access to this since since last year, and have already been implementing it - see attached)
2. A better hair shader compatible with the iray curves (existing shaders already worked to an extent but with some compromises)
From my perspective, it seems like an incremental improvement, but I am saying this from position of daz end user, not PA. If you are a PA perhaps it is more significant.
Edit: I recall that when the iray curves / fibers were added to iray 2020, they were supposedly introduced alongside a native Hair BSDF, but i guess we hadn't seen that yet in Daz Studio. Or had we? Maybe that's what we are going to see soon? Either way, why these things take so many years to arrive, I shall never know.
Information is here if someone with more braincells than me wants to read and interpret it: https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/iray/whitepapers/rtx_gtc_2020/s22494-rtx-accelerated-hair-brought-to-life-with-nvidia-iray.pdf
The MDL 1.6 Hair BSDF section of those slides above cites the chiang et al paper, which im pretty sure is also the basis for Blender's Hair BSDF shader and which imo looks really nice compared to blended dual lobe shader in Daz. Must say, it would be nice to see a good hair shader in Daz one day.
You are correct, she discussed a new method for creating hair, one that I am excited to "use". I have tried to create SBH in DAZ and didn't get far which is why I agreed with the OP. Personally I have never been a big fan of SBH products in DAZ. I don't think they look all the great and the ones I have tried are very resource intensive.
I for one, don't think it is unfair for PAs to have access to tools or info that users don't have. Who knows, maybe the process she is using will be doable for non PAs, I guess we will see, but for now, i am just excited to try out the new hair products.
on the not fair thing, say for instance that you wanted to become a PA and sell a hair that you designed but didnt have the entire toolkit at the time. Would it even be up to par with what other PAs are doing? Chevybabe for instance has been here as long as me, if I recall, but I never took the time to really learn anything, being all helter skelter all the time. whereas others got in early as a PA or even through a different avenue of products and then can get all the PA delvelopment tools. It is what it is but it does leave the regular user without a full toolkit. In the case of this hair, no one need think about me ever getting to a PA level. I'm still trying to make a curve that looks like a curve
The way I see it, if you (anyone) wanted to be a PA, then you do the best job you can to become a PA to get access to the PA tools. The tools should not be freely avaliable for anyone IMO, that takes away some of the advantages of being a PA and gives users less of an incentive in being a PA. Every creator has different levels of talent and skills, just look at the various products in the store and compare the quality. I did game design for a while and then I got hired by a studio and had access to all kinds of apps, plugins and tools. When I left I had no more access to them, was I bummed, sure, but I understood.
makes sense for sure.
On the subject of becoming a PA to use hair tools, Daz3D seem to want you to create around four finished products before receiving PA status these days, or at least that was my interpretation of the relatively vague/indirect feedback i received when applying a few months ago. Completing four products (without even having access to the tools to fully complete them) feels a bit kafkaesque, and is not an insignificant investment in time for an initial outlay, especially when you are not given an indication of expected revenue from the product sales.
Is the expectation that you spend months or weeks building a catalogue of four products without guaranteed entry to become a PA, and without being able to run a test sale to see if it's worth it?
On some level, I see where they are coming from but at the same time it seems a big deterrent to potential vendors.
There are a bunch of hairs in the store that don't use dForce Hair at all. It is completely possible to make hair in a bunch of different ways, and most of those ways are fully accessible (assuming one gets the appropriate apps and tools to make and modify them).
In fact, I'd guess that over half the hairs released on the store in any given month are not dForce Hair.
my sole issue with Dforce strandbased hair being PA only is the fact I cannot do out of the box things with it like I do with Carrara.
I rarely even simulate Carrara fur on creatures and DForce cloth hairs IMO are superior to Strandbased hairs anyway, I really only buy SB Dforce hair iif on sale mostly for Filament or if fur for a critter but I prefer rigged fibermesh hair if I can get it, which sadly nobody does anymore.
What I do want to do is use it for interactive grass on terrains any terrain which one cannot do
you can either buy the few flat options or a specific terrain with Dforce curve grass if it's produced
Carrara I can paint my grass where I like on anything
and yes, I do just use Carrara but it's also a shame not everything I want to use it with will work in Carrara either as DAZ no longer supports it,
The fact is I buy a damned lot of DAZ content but DForce strandbased hair is not finding its way generally into my cart so whatever strategy is behind making it PA only is not working as far as selling it to me, the fact it exists just annoys me because I cannot use the technology how I would like in my renders.
and Oso3D I don't buy your critters for the hair, you could sell them bald and I would still buy them
Wait... we already had the Chiang Hair BSDF brick in shader mixer this whole time, presumably since vmaterials 1.6 was supported
Nobody uses this...?
...then why have a strand based hair editor available? Not everyone is has the time and skill to be a PA I used to work wit h the old Garibaldi hair (the predecessor to the strand based hair editor) and reasonable success with it. I can understand making HD proprietary, but Garibaldi has been around for years beforehand.
If you have to be a PA to use it, take the tools out of the general release.
Thanks for that. It's been a few beta updates since I messes with making SBH and your notes look helpful. The hair in those renders looks great.
Im glad that the commercial thread created a little inspiration :)
The shader is nothing fancy. It's the dual lobe with an added block to turn the shader 90 degrees when the tesselation is set at 0. This makes the root to tip work properly. The settings also had to drastically change because they are curves, not geometry. Daz implemented the curves last June and I was hoping to have an official shader by now, but here we are. So, I have taken things into my own hands, hooked stuff up, and given vendors permission (sans textures) to use it. We have it, lets utilize it.
Wait... we already had the Chiang Hair BSDF brick in shader mixer this whole time, presumably since vmaterials 1.6 was supported
Nobody uses this...?
I am aware of those additional hair blocks, but I am not fond of custom shaders, and I have zero interest in fixing them when studio breaks them with an update.
Daz has a 'fiber_chiang_hair_fur.mdl' in the main shaders folder, given pride of place alongside pbrskin and dual lobe etc, and was released at the same time as the iray curves for SBH (see attached). So maybe this is supposed to be the official shader. This appears to use the chiangi et al method developed for Disney, which Blender also uses.
I brought the shader into Daz, but not an expert in Shader Mixer, so still playing around with settings. So far, I cannot get it to look like Blender's Hair BSDF at all.
It would be nice to be able to set up the shader in shader mixer such that the parameters can be changed across length of the hair strand, particularly for the azimuthal and longitudinal roughness settings, as the chiangi et al paper suggests high azimuthal and logidtuinal roughness at root can be used to 'fake' dense undercoat for animal furs.
What I mean, is an official preset shader. As an example, dual lobe. All hooked up with a preset built right into our shader presets folder. It's a pity the chiang one isnt hooked up, its rather cool. The Hair BSDF is also in there.
I wonder what is taking them so long, as evidence would seem to suggest it was on their agenda at some point.
My guess is that there are more important things on their plate right now. I am sure they will eventually get to it.
You don't have to be a PA to use the Strand based hair. as you said the version in DS availble to customers is the same as Garibaldi - why remove it. Might as well remove Iray and Dforce bacause some don't have the hardware to use them.
my trouble with self made SBH is that the way I safe it it doesn't follow movement when applied before moving the figure or item in place ande pose
Likely I'm missing some crucial step here but that annoyed me so I only use it in rare cases where I don't need to move anything after creation
Easy fix. If you load an SBH into scene, change 'fit to' to the figure or haircap. Then you have to toggle the Apply Transformations button.
Also keep the SBH unparented.
Perhaps as PA, you and other PAs will have enough cachet with developers to petition they set this as priority.
I hope so :)