Hair models really coarse?/Where does this go?

greywolf

Hi, I still don't know where things go so I'm sorry if this is out of place.

I've been turning out some decent poses/renders (I think) but something driving me crazy is the hair, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

In particular:  Using a spotlight on Braided Band hair, tried softening shadows, diminishing their intensity a bit but the hair still looks like someone ran a comb thru it after applying brylcreem™. (see attached)

Can anyone give me some pointers for softening the hair somewhat?

 

UncannyValet

Looking at the clay renders on the product page, the hair you are rendering appears like those.

Are you using the material presets that came with the hair? (Edit: I ask this because I assume you might not be using the proper materials that come with the hair - the bespoke materials it comes with should have opacity maps etc, and I can see yours doesnt seem to be using such. Also, if you look at the nape of her neck in your image, the hair there appears to have a purely white shader applied to that material zone, suggesting you may have altered the shaders.)

greywolf

Looking for material presets for this particular hair, there seem to be none other than the colours, and I did do some manual tweaks on the coloration. I'll retry from scratch and see what happens.  Not sure where that white is coming from; that's interesting -- thank you for pointing that out. [EDIT: That's an earring...]

 

crosswind

If you render with iray, you need to apply MDL mat. preset...

UncannyValet

greywolf said:

Looking for material presets for this particular hair, there seem to be none other than the colours, and I did do some manual tweaks on the coloration. I'll retry from scratch and see what happens.  Not sure where that white is coming from; that's interesting -- thank you for pointing that out.

So... are you using the material presets?  

When you apply the material preset, does it render correctly? When you load the hair as new, does it render correctly? If you are tweaking the shaders,are you retaining the opacity maps in the Opacity channel of the shader and retaining the horizontal and vertical tiling (because you should)?

crosswind

Goldtassel customized a mixed shader for it GoldTasselHairShader (MDL), so Cutout Opacity slot was labeled as "Transmap" and fully mapped with no problem. No need to convert it to Iray Uber as this shader works better.

greywolf

UncannyValet said:

So... are you using the material presets?  

When you apply the material preset, does it render correctly? When you load the hair as new, does it render correctly? If you are tweaking the shaders,are you retaining the opacity maps in the Opacity channel of the shader and retaining the horizontal and vertical tiling (because you should)?

I am tweaking colours only; not tweaking any opacity at all.

When I start from scratch it looks better.  Not sure what I did wrong but it's working better.  Using some of the other hair shaders has also helped a little.

 

Dartanbeck

No, as crosswind says, use the hair shaders that come with it, as they are a special shader.

I don't own that hair - so to find the material presets, open your DIM and find the product

Right-click the product in DIM > Show Installed Files

Look through the large list to find the hair shaders. They'll be in there. Just take note of where they're located in the library so you can find them and apply them ;)

Because, well... this looks Awesome!!!

Dartanbeck

Often times the materials are in the same place as the hair itself in the library. Just click the little black arrow by the product and you should see "Materials" or "MATS" under it

greywolf

Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I was doing this.  Somehow managed to end up using the RSL shaders instead; the MDL shaders work much better.

Been using DAZ for over a year and I'm still a Noob.  Thanks for being patient with me.

 

Ninefold

This specific hairstyle has its materials in folders named 3Delight and Iray (see attached). It sounds like greywolf didn't have any trouble finding them, though.

As for the white in the hair, that's what happens when this hair's scalp diffuse map is applied to some of its non-scalp surfaces, notably EarFine; there are some white regions around the edge of the map. I'm guessing this was a Paste to Selected Surface(s) situation.

greywolf, this hair uses one set of maps for its scalp and one for all of its other surfaces, so when you're tweaking things, you can copy and paste freely among all surfaces OTHER than the scalp. Things will get weird if you paste a non-scalp material to the scalp, or the scalp material to a non-scalp zone.

Dartanbeck

greywolf said:

Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking when I was doing this.  Somehow managed to end up using the RSL shaders instead; the MDL shaders work much better.

Been using DAZ for over a year and I'm still a Noob.  Thanks for being patient with me.

I'm a few years new. I'm still learning my way around too. 

Once I got into what I really want to do, I focused heavy into that, so there's a Lot of DS left that I have to wrap my head around! ;)

 

I'm glad you got it working. That image crosswind posted looks awesome! I like that hair!!!

memcneil70

I have had that hair since 2019 and it is one I love for historical or modern renders. It is one of my must be re-installs when a crash destroys my runtime, or I have a new computer for D|S. Can't recommend Goldtassel's hairs enough.