Distinguishing types of hair - A project (Solved!)

paulawp (marahzen)

Hey all, I'm gearing up to do a project of cataloging my Daz hairs and want to include a checkbox for what kind of hair they are. What actually are the different types of hair used in Daz, and how does one generally distinguish them? I never really considered the nuts and bolts of how it works, though I did learn recently about strand-based hair.

It appears you can identify a hair as strand-based if it has Tesselation and usually they have a base or cap and a separate hair. What other varieties are there and how do I know a particular hair product is one? Thanks!

Gordig

Fibermesh is made of polygonal strands, meaning that it's not transmapped, but also not SBH. I think Neftis is (or at least was) the leading producer of Fibermesh. "dForce hair" encompasses transmapped polygonal hair with dForce cloth applied to it (Linday and FESoul are the two PAs that I most associate with that), SBH that is dForce compatible, and SBH that is NOT dForce compatible, like some of Toyen's offerings.

columbine

I wish someone would write a debaffler for hair types, using very simple words someone like me can understand ... because, Gordig, nothing personal, but that made almost absolutely no sense to me whatsoever--just like most of the explanations of hair types have made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

(I'd really like to know, because there seems to be a particular type of hair that I hate working with because it grinds everything to a crawl--characters are nearly impossible to move or pose due to the lag--and I'd like to know how to spot it so that I can avoid using it unless it's on a character who is going to be in one scene and not posed or moved around a lot.)

I mean, I need REALLY REALLY simple words.

paulawp (marahzen)

OK, say OOT's gorgeous hairs. Clearly not SBH or fibermesh. What are those kind called? 

SilverGirl

columbine said:

I wish someone would write a debaffler for hair types, using very simple words someone like me can understand ... because, Gordig, nothing personal, but that made almost absolutely no sense to me whatsoever--just like most of the explanations of hair types have made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

(I'd really like to know, because there seems to be a particular type of hair that I hate working with because it grinds everything to a crawl--characters are nearly impossible to move or pose due to the lag--and I'd like to know how to spot it so that I can avoid using it unless it's on a character who is going to be in one scene and not posed or moved around a lot.)

I mean, I need REALLY REALLY simple words.

I wish there was an easy to understand, all-in-one-place glossary of terms *in general.*

I'm gradually catching on to some stuff, but the number of times I go "the who what where?" and then have to find a decoder ring to understand something is... vast. 

Gordig

Let me try again, then. The three main categories of hair:

Transmapped hair is made out of ribbons that use opacity maps to create the appearance of hair. This was basically the only hair available at first, until the other kinds came along. Untextured, it will look like this:

Fibermesh hair is made of individual tubes for each strand. Untextured, it will still look like hair, because it effectively IS hair. Consider the difference between default Genesis eyelashes: 

...and Fibermesh eyelashes:

Those individual hairs aren't just an illusion created by opacity maps, they're actually individual hairs.

Strand-based hair (SBH) is made of curves or splines, which are visible in the viewport, but are not geometry at all until they are rendered. This is what most hair called dForce is. In the viewport, it will look kind of toon-shaded, because it's only a proxy until you render it:

This is probably the hair you have the most trouble with, but personally it's just about all I use.

paulawp (marahzen)

Thanks Gordig! I get it.

columbine

THANK YOU GORDIG

That was extremely useful.

And, yeah, strand-based hair is the kind that I hate because it slows down posing and manipulation of figures in the viewport horribly, and often doesn't have a full placeholder in viewport (presumably to make it a little less horrible to work with) so you can't actually get an idea of what it looks like until you do the render for real. However, it is also the hair that IMO looks the best. Tradeoffs.

I'm not sure I have any full heads of hair that are fibermesh. I seem to see fibermesh for eyebrows and eyelashes, stubble, and the occasional hair that's really, really short and/or straight/spiky, like nearly-shaved buzzcuts, or a Mohawk. But I don't think I've ever seen a hairstyle that was long enough to reach down to, say, the ears, done in fibermesh.

 

Gordig

Neftis's Jeremy Long Hair (and many of their other hairs) kind of split the difference between transmapped and Fibermesh. For a full head of hair, Fibermesh is arguably the worst available option, as it's more difficult to rig than transmapped hair, not as realistic as SBH, and more polygon-dense than either transmapped or SBH, at least in the viewport.

NorthOf45

To answer the OOT question, he uses a mix of transmapped ribbons and fibremesh. The transmapped ribbons form the bulk of the hair, and the fibremesh is for the loose and stray hairs to give more realism. (Unless you go through a can of hairspray a week. Do they still make hairspray?)

Richard Haseltine

Older hair doesn't even use ribbons, it uses more-or-less concentric shells with transparency maps applied - and was usually just called transmapped or layered hair, to distinguish it from the really old hair that was just a single solid mesh with no transparency at all.

miladyderyni_173d399f47

paulawp (marahzen) said:

Thanks Gordig! I get it.

Me too. And you also defined "Spline," another term I didn't know.