Garibaldi Express: Hair and Fur Plugin Beta [Commercial]
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Outside faces...
Basically it was to take a flat plane and divide the snot out of it, then vary the edges...but it seems that, and I'm not sure which is doing it, but something odd happens with more than eight sides...no matter what it comes out as if the area were being calculated as if it were a circle. 4 through 6 sides seems to be calculated as if it were a square and 8 comes out close to the area of an octagon. Also it was to make the surface itself 'crumpled'...by doing this, it's like wadding up a piece of paper. The surface area is still the same, but you can now fit it into a smaller volume. But it isn't as effective as it could be, because of that square or circle method of calculating the area...instead of trying to calculate the 'correct' number of sides.
Then as long as the item is mostly like what it seems to be, a 3d item's area pretty much follows cube/sphere calculations...and it still works that way even if you make more than one material zone for it. So a cube is going to have more hairs than a plane...a sphere/dome more than a circle (spheres are easiest to work with). There is a point, though, that it seems to flip back to a 'flat' object.
With my dome, I comb all the hairs to point the same direction. For smaller items (under about 6 cm diameter) the sphere seems to be the densest.
I think I finally figured out how I ran into trouble with my tribble...I started with a sphere, that originally was pretty large, squashed it some and then used the scaling script to scale it, but didn't 'lock' the scale transform by exporting/importing the scaled item...so when I saved it, the hair was actually using the area of the 'large' version.
(eta:I KNOW I fixed that bloody quote tag...at least once, already)
Thats interesting, I see you've really thought this out :) I'll toy with spheres rather than the ends of cylinders next time around. I've revised a ponytail hairstyle I did previously, this time with lower head hair count (For practicalities) and increased the ponytail hair 'count from 400-480 with 3 nodes' to '1 node 1000 count'... The test renders of the ponytail show vast improvement. I'm rendering the portrait and will also do a side on view as well.
Cheers Man. I look forward to seeing/hearing your future results/discoveries :)
Revised Ponytail style.
Portrait: Render time: 53 mins, 5 nodes total. Left bang, Right Bang, Full head hair (200 hair count), Ponytail (1000 Hair Count) and Eyebrows. This rendered rather fast.
Side View: Render Time: 2 hrs 11 mins Same nodes... Attempted to reduce render time by removing all hair at the crown and leaving the outer edges in which deceivingly covers up the missing hair (about 60-70% of hair was removed). Unfortunately that didnt work as expected, Render time cut down a little, but not by much at all.
Side view is the full rendered size. Portrait is scaled down.
impresive spyro well donexx
That pony tail is looking awesome. I must try one soon!
Here is a short thick mess and a GH furred bikini top :)
Wow! Very nice work!
Not a ponytail, just long hair draped over the shoulder.
I made this hair a few weeks ago, but decided to tweak it with the root angle tools.
One node - for my sins. :lol:
Thanks very much guys!
@ Mangee - Nice work man I picture her on the cat walk :)
@Gone - Only use the amount of nodes it needs to create the look your after. I use a scull cap node for short hairstyles to help prevent the balding affect. Long hair, the only reason I used multiple nodes was for ease of control when posing, and to not have to struggle with auto parting (Which I just cant get to work in many cases). Looks great man! How long did it take to render out of curiosity? I couldn't get the side view of the ponytail below the 2 + hours, and wonder how well 'long loose hair' takes :) Also you might know... When extruding hair curves heaps, does it require resampling of the curves? I dont really understand what resampling is for :-S
That's why I said "for my sins". :-)
If I had 2 nodes, then I could restyle the long hair quickly and easily without disturbing the top. As it is, I have to be careful about how I comb so I don't make a mess of the top hair. But, then, the whole point of this particular hair was to see how easy it would be to work with just one node. :cheese:
This is one of the hairs I did where the outer edge of the paint map is white but most of the map is painted at 60%. This let me set the distribution amount to 350 to get a tight hair line but still generate only about 120,000 hairs. Playing with the root angle tools goes a long way to filling in bald spots.
As I understand it, when you lengthen the hair, additional verts are automatically created with the specified length - the default is 1 (used to be 0.5). If you change the resample to a smaller amount you will get smoother curves and more verts. Increase the sample size to reduce vert count but get more angular curves. Ultimately, the style you create and your needs will determine if you need to resample. The hair length is only one factor to consider if you want to resample or not.
The only time I've resampled is with eyebrows. I set the sample rate to 0.2 so I can get better curves because the hair is too short for the default sample rate to look good. At least that's my opinion - YMMV. With long, smooth hair, you can probably increase the sample size to reduce the vert count without having much impact on the quality.
Most of the images I've poseted lately have been using the Julie AOIBL light set. This has UE2 light so takes a longer time to render. Most of my renders are in the 1.5 hour range. This one was 3 hours. With just the default lighting, it renders in about 10 minutes.
So, there's my sad story. ;-P
It's not a sad story man, cheers for the info. At least my render time for the long hair is pretty average. I wasn't sure If I did something which extended the render time, all my short hair portraits have averaged 20-25 mins, the back/side views vary 30-40 mins at a 1500x1500 size render. Same lighting.
If the ponytail is part of the same head hair node, render time doubles more or less, if its separate it seems to render substantially faster. (May have something to do with such a high hair count all crammed together. The back of the head hair node when the ponytail is separate node still takes a long time to render.
I think perhaps some of my render time would be somewhat influenced by the Uber Environment light that's rather bright in the light set I'm using.
I really must start getting in on all this,
Right now, I'm still familiarising myself with lights and shaders (It's been a LONG time since I had DS.), but I do fully intend to do something with Garibaldi Hair in due course. I can see that I will no doubt be bugging the heck out of you guys, so get ready LOL!
Spyro, you really seem to have got the hang of this so I'll more than likely be approaching you a lot. The main project I want to do with this is King Kong, I have everything else I need but want to do more fur on him.
Keep up the good work guys and I will join the party at some point
CHEERS!
Well, there goes that theory. >:(
I had thought that fewer verts would make for a faster render - but not so.
As I mentioned with the previous image, I had made the hair a few weeks ago so the default resample/interpolate settings were 0.5. Just over 120,000 hairs were generated with 5.5 million verts. As mentioned, it took just over 3 hours to render.
With this one, everything is set up the same but I changed the resample/interpolate to 2. Same hair count but only 2 million verts. Render time was 5 hours!
Hair still looks decent but you can clearly see the effect of the resample.
Gone I far prefer the first one as it seems to sit on her head better.
Inspired by all of these ponytails I had a quick go at one myself last night. :)
I used a fur shader on my hairtie to help make the join work and looking at it now I think the tail should have been fuller... but all in all an encouraging exercise and I now at least have a useable little hair tie prop for helping with my GH ponytails.
For my tail I used a resized armband from some clothing set and parented a squashed sphere inside it that the ponytail hair is growing on. The hardest part by far was brushing the main hair and organising a join point that looked credible and I do think the fur shader on the hair tie has helped a bit with hiding how messy the join really is.
The fur shader was a good idea.
Well done Mangee! What was your render time for this? Did you find it at all longer time than your loose hair of similar length? Works well with the fury hairtie :) Like the combing too!
@ Gone - Its a very strange territory trying to reduce render time. All obvious methods just don't seem to work. :-S
hmmm I never relate to people talking about render times as I always render at ridiculous pixel sizes and use raytraced shadows so most of my renders are several hours.
This one was done more as a test so I used a much smaller (for me) pixel size (1990x1407) but it still was walk away and leave it rendering for a while and I think it took close to 2 hours... but better than 5 or 6 which is often the case... although I have had many huge multi day render times in the past... I guess I need more than just 8gb RAM with how I operate.
Most of my renders are over double the pixel size of this one because I put my better renders in a Print On Demand gallery and offer prints fo rsale so I need the large size.... I sold a 3foot x 4foot framed canvass the other day and you need a large render to print that big!
Anyway at the moment I am making a series of hair colour maps from a noise map so I have some quick options at hand for when I want styles like the ponytail with multiple nodes to match. The noise map approach is working well and I will post some samples of the different colours when I have a batch of them.
Since we are on ponytails, I thought I would try my hand at it.
Being the ornery cuss that I am, I put all the hair on the head. There are 3 nodes: one for the main head hair, one for the ponytail, and one for the "tie". I was trying to make it look like the hair was tied in a knot as some have been known to do. Total hair count for all 3 nodes and the eyebrows is just over 125,000.
The main hair and the tie were the hardest to do. Fortunately, now that I have it saved as a wearable preset, I don't have to repeat that exercise again. Render time was just over 2 hours.
Very nice man! You know your stuff :) Well it sounds like two hrs is norm for a pony tail. The hair density for your ponytail node looks really good. And the parting is great, well done :)
@Mangey - When you have a call for large renders, it makes sense to leave the computer do its job. I'm thinking long hair should be rendered in that same view. And 9 times out of ten, the results are totally worth the render time with GH. At least I know what time to expect the ponytails to render... Just got to check and test all settings/GH surfacing settings before rendering the longer hair. :)
Some amazing looking hair being done here. Can't wait to get back into it
Finally downloaded the latest version of Garibaldi, after hearing that an OBJ exporter had been added. Things are working much smoother, with far fewer freezes and crashes, (5 year old laptop with only 4G RAM in it), and was able to export as OBJ, but am not experienced enough to figure out how to get textures to export with it. My laptop chokes severely when importing back into Daz....it imports into Daz 3 easier than Daz 4.5.....anyway, ended up layering the 3Delight render of this curly do with the Reality render of the girl to achieve the desired results, but it works! Love the way the hair renders in 3Delight, just not loving how skin textures render in it. Once I figure out how to export the hair textures with the OBJ, assuming they will export looking like they do originally, I'll be more than pleased....
wow cool renders well done
I've just sent out emails to the beta testers with links to Garibaldi Express beta 13.
As always make sure you read the changes for this version in the email.
This doesn't really answer you problem but anyway...
So when you create a Garibaldi Node and connect a Geometry node (normally with the dialog provided), then open the Garibaldi Editor for the first time the current worldspace pose/position is cached for use in the editor.
This pose is used for follicle distribution amounts regardless of how you change the pose/position is the Daz scene (but the hair position etc updates). This is done to guarantee what you get in the Garibaldi Editor is what is rendered in Daz and when geometry has animation the same amount of follicles are created to make sure no jumping/flickering of hairs happen. Think about as an animal moves their skin stretches so the surface area of the skin changes. At any time you can update the geometry used by the Garibaldi Editor by using the update button in the Setup workspace.
I don't know why you get different results using a script and the Daz UI, Garibaldi uses the geometry the Daz would use to render.
On a side note...
If you use very dense overlapping hair you might find memory usage is high when rendering (especially when the hair is semi transparent), reducing the render bucket size (may slow render speed) and reducing pixel samples (lower render quality) will reduce memory usage
Just a quick image. I reworked one of my older short styles and used one of my noise based colour maps.
There are a couple of other scripts that work that way, too. I think that it is because by using a script the changes aren't 'committed' until you save the geometry. My question is...bug or by design...and I can see valid points for both
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
does this software still need an nVidia card to use?
"Was your head with you, all day today?"
wow gone good render hun
Now here is something odd that's recently started...I don't recall it ever happening before beta 12, but it did sometimes. It only affects the viewport image, so I thought it may be a driver issue. But I rolled back a couple of versions, in addition to using both the latest 'certified' and beta versions of the Nvidia driver.
But, and here's the kicker...it doesn't affect the render.
Also it takes creating a new scene, without a hair node or a restart to fix.