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It should. I used a simple plane with a shadow catcher and rigged grass blades with a shadow catcher replicated on the plane. I used an oscillate or noise tweener to move the grass. I loaded in a reference image to the backdrop to set up my cameras and lights and rendered the animation with an alpha channel. I composited it in FCP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8puXTRXt7Y
I tried it several ways as a shadow catcher, and it's showing up as something... definitely can't use it this way... I'll continue with green screen for now until I can figure out how to make the SC work.
To be honest, I haven't tried the shadow catcher on an object with hair. I'll have to see what happens on my end.
Every time I try working with this hair, I just cannot get over how nice it can look with a little patience. So far my first few tests never even made it into Dogwaffle. Still trying to calm it down a bit. If this next test doesn't prove better, I'll keep the proxy, but take away its collision, and add a few spheres for the collision. I'm actually wondering why I haven't tried that yet! (Smacks forehead)
3DLUST told me to try that a long time ago!
Yeah the spheres worked great for me when all else seemed to fail - hope it works for you!
I think I'm just trying for too long of hair :(
Are your curls in the hair guides or in the shader?
Also what are your guide section and hair section numbers? Are they the same - because I recently started experimenting with low section guide hairs and high section hairs, since a lot of the shader stuff responds to hair sections.... As usual, I lost like 3 days of my life doing this with no clear idea of what I am doing, but it brought up some interesting questions....
A few years back I did a Ponytail Challenge to try to get the scooby gang to distill some useable hair sim parameters... If it's anything like the soft body cloth, the number of sections in the hair and the scale of object in your scene will radically effect the sim calc.... so imo, it is more important to understand the controls than to find "good settings"....
I agree with that last, Holly.
I am using a fairly high (I think) number, like 30, in hair segments, and then overriding down to 18. I am applying Kink to the shader. Whenever I try to add curls to the hair, itself, they come out upon simulation.
One thing I *just* learned is the difference in Hair Stiffness and Shape Stiffness.... Shape preserves curl and brush "shape", where as Hair is the continuity of flow down the length of the hair (kind of like IK chain... They are all affected by Air Damping.
And don't forget that even in real life hair doesn't do what it does in shampoo commercials - not without elaborate proxies and hair ninjas....
So I get the feeling that I'm being suggested to try and brush curls into two and a half feet of hair. I'll try it. Again. I may also just try to abandon the curls - but I don't want to. Actually, if it comes to that, I'll go with my conforming hair instead.
So the last time I tried tooling curls into guide hairs, I recall getting a horrific headache. Any tips on that?
See... my hair starts out sticking straight out from the mesh, and then I drape it before the simulation. I won't have that if I am to try and tool in curls, will I? I'll have to drape it so far, then convert it, so it stays there. Then go in and try to tool in the curls, am I right? Because Shape also controls they shape that the guide hairs are positioned in, if I remember correctly.
That being the case, I'll likely need around 100 segments? At 30 the curls tooled in are like geometric shapes instead of curls. I also recall that it's very difficult to get the curls really tight (small).
Yeah, basically you shouldn't use all the tools all at once. ;)
There is a shader method for hair curls and a guide method for hair curls.... You can also mix-n-match sections of hair that will be simmed and sections that won't be simmed, so there might be reasons to (for instance) create the bulk of the hair with guides then leave it alone (brush into style first, then use the Curler), and have a few "action strands" that are simpler straight guides with a curl shader.... The straight guides would be designed to sim (like maybe one each side of the head that hangs in front of her shoulders that can really move around.... And remember you can have multiple hair models on the same mesh, so break up that design into as many useable overlapping sections as required....
My theory is the same as all sims: keep the model as simple as possible and you will get realistic results. I was NOT able to sim with guide hairs too close together, they all triggered each other's proximity and wiggled, but my ponytail with a single long guide simmed beautifully (32 sections and 64 sections tested) and gracefully (but not dramatically like the hair ninja, but with only one guide it would be easy to create ninja bubbles or even doughnuts that move the guide hair around....
I'll try some more tests ;)
Thanks so much for sharing your results, Holly. I really appreciate it.
I really don't want to give up on this! :shut:
Okay, my next test will begin with these thoughts:
Start fresh with a new setup of only primitive spheres.
Get a good style going from perhaps several separate hair groups that can remain non-simulated
Make a couple more hair groups that simulate
Run tests between tooled curls with a higher shape setting and no kink in the shader vs my favored shader on straight guides
Yeah, like the cloth sim, fewer polys seem to work much better - it's a little counter intuitive. I STRONGLY suggest making a single-guide ponytail to test shader and animation settings. You will be amazed.
I also have a suspicion that you could scale up a figure to giantess proportions and the Air Dampening would look more articulated (more undulate-y).... at least that's how the cloth sim worked. Small cloths barely waved, but 30ft long cloths were awesome....
Keep at it. I'm almost sure it can be done, but trying to sim a head full of guides all close together is not going to work.... There will be a different method for successful animations. I've gotten it to work.... Then it's a matter of building UP your full hair and not adding ANYTHING you don't need. I'm 100% convinced this is a bottom up method, not a top down. That's how Carrara always is when it comes to animation - keep her fast and light and you will get good results.
I wouldn't use a sphere, I would use whatever you are growing the hair on now (skull cap or Vicky, whichever) but bring it down to a couple of "ponytails" that cannot influence each other because they are two far away from each other.... Like for your heroine's hair I would try to do it with only three guide hairs (!), I think the trick is to get animating strands to not influence each other, but still collide with Vicky's mesh.
Cool... thanks ;)
So Holly, I've finally read your super-cool Mil Cat fur tutorial cartoon from beginning to end, soaking up the whole concept. Very nicely made tutorial... I love it.
I'm feeling stuck right now, so I'm just going to dive in and go for what feels right in my gut.
You say to keep guide hair count low, but to make separate hair that doesn't require simulation. So for those areas, I'm assuming that I can go ahead and use more guide hairs for more brush control - so for now, that's where I'm headed.
I think I recall that I was getting jittery hair, even when it wasn't simulated, when using kink or frizz in the shader, so I'm going to try and tool in the curls first.
He's an image of how far I've got so far, making a new version of Rosie using Genesis 2 Female, Girl 6, Vicky 6, Teen Josie, Gia, Olympia, and a pile of other morphs. Pretty close so far. This one is wearing four layers of conforming hair.
Yikes. I got some decent curls made using the curl tool, on some shorter hairs that I made to cover the top part of the scalp. I used only four guide hairs. The problem comes when I render an animation. I didn't simulate the hair. Just draped it, and then went into the hair modeler to "Convert" it, which locks the hair as it is, so when you "Clear Animation", it goes back to this locked conversion.
I tested how shape and hair stiffness controls work. I was thinking that I may be able to get less jitters by setting these better. Indeed, it worked to set a higher value on Shape, to keep the tool-made curls during draping.
Now I wanted to see if there were any jitters in an animation, without ever applying a simulation. Bummer. I set the render to finish a little bit after the character stopped moving, which is exactly where the jitters stopped. So far it appears to me that, whenever Carrara hair is in motion, it must jitter.
However, this was done without using 3DLust's advice to "Only collide with Primitive Spheres", as per the advice above, so I just had it collide with Genesis 2 Female, which does have a lot of polygons.Still... why does it jitter during movement? And why are there no jitters during 3DLust's animation/simulation? I obviously have not found the right setup for this yet. Argh!
As a test, turn off hair collides with hair.... (under the main effects settings > Physics)
Also set Vicky's "friction" to nothing (as I assumer hair should slide over her skin...
In my opinion, you wil NEVER NEVER NEVER learn what is going wrong with a complex hair style with lots and lots of guides. Seriously, it's like "Learn to drive? Well, I'm gonna start with flying this Boing 747 and if I don't crash and burn then maybe I can drive to the corner store...."
sounds like a plan....
:P
Also that hair you posted above looks gorgeous! Better than the earlier frizz-look.
LOL... That's my conforming hair! :)
Right, I only used four guide hairs, no shaping extensions in the shader, just color, highlight and shininess, length and thickness.
However, I didn't actually go it and change physics properties... I'll do that.
It was just very depressing to see it glitching without being simulated! Argh! If it's not simulated... why would it glitch? I have a feeling that the hair shader is a global setting. It's beyond my comprehension on trying to make glitch-free simulated hair, if just the short test I did glitched without being animated... right?
Anyways, I still not giving up. But it is beginning to make me feel dismal.
If I could get it to behave only somewhat, I could try and smooth out the jitters in Howler.
So my next step will be to leave a non-simulated hair, and try various frames/second settings on the render. Another thing is that I'm using very low render settings, including Fast AA, which may even be part of the cause. So many tests to consider.
oh... :down:
Clumping is definitely calculated globally (why there is a local lock toggle for it)
The others I don't know, but I used Wave and it did not move randomly.
Try turning off clumping (like the curler, there is also a setting internal to the hair where you can create clumping without a shader)
As I said. The results I got had nothing added in the shader. Just color and such. Didn't even simulate the hair, just the head movement on the character... flicker.
oh... :down:
Clumping is definitely calculated globally (why there is a local lock toggle for it)
The others I don't know, but I used Wave and it did not move randomly.
Try turning off clumping (like the curler, there is also a setting internal to the hair where you can create clumping without a shader)Okay, so you've had success with dynamic hair without sporadic jitter from one frame to the next - for each frame through the entire animation, this is very helpful to know.
I now have a hunch that it's my render settings. In your Mil Cat Fur tutorial, you mention turning AA up to best. I am rendering at Object 2, Shadows 4, AA Fast. That's enough to make non dynamics jitter if there's a lot of detail to ray trace... perhaps that's what my problem has been all along.
More tests today.
Thanks for your patience, Holly... it's truly appreciated.
Everyone else, too. 3DLust, I have your post with settings and suggestions bookmarked ;)
Good luck. I think what you are calling "jitter" is what I might call "flicker?" Similar to speckles, but not hair actually "crawling around" as if filled with live worms or sim jerk-y scrambling??
Part of the issue is there is no common language here.
You also might try lowering filter sharpness to 0% - it definitely has an effect on fine details...
Argh. Patience has limits. Starting over from scratch has got the best of me. Hair that doesn't belong to any guide, crossing straight through the neck and head... I forgot how much of a pain it was to get my hair the way it was. Forget this for now, or I'll never get anything done or get any sleep. I looked around at other hair sim videos on YouTube last night, and nobody else seems to be doing any good with other software, like the $3.5 Thousand C4D either... so I don't feel too left out.
Maybe another time I'll muster up some more patience. This is a disaster.
LOL...
Right. I have been testing ever since! :)
Nonetheless, I went back to where I was, and am trying various settings in the hair simulation, while leaving the kink and clumping in the shader. The results are very much the same, when it comes to what I have been referring to as jitters, flicker, what have you.
The gif below is what I mean by that. It seems to be caused by a complete recalculation from one frame to the next, rather than some sort of 'form this result to that result' sort of calculation.
I have also gone to Object and Shadow accuracies of 0.5 each and AA = Best.
So I think my next step will be to try this same simulation, but without any kink or clumping, just to see if it can be made better using straight shader settings. I seem to recall getting smooth simulations with straight hair, but have been unable to reproduce a single flicker-free animation since I've picked back up on this.
You know, the conforming hair does look okay! LOL
I just cannot help to hope that I can get this hair to work, somehow.
So instead of completely starting from scratch, I think I'll try starting from this one, and backing up a bit. Reduce the guide hairs, etc.,
The thing is, I actually like a lot of the movements that I have been getting from this hair, if only those flickers weren't present.
Also, when you mentioned the idea of using more than one hair group, were you talking about adding additional hair objects to the figure? I haven't yet seen how I could make multiple 'groups' in the same hair, yet only simulate one of them.
I wish that the simulator would look at the previous frame hair placement, and calculate that against where dynamics wants to take it in the next frame, to create where the hair is during the current frame. Perhaps it does, and I'm messing with it somehow. Perhaps it just isn't meant to simulate hair this long.
Sure, blame the program... ;)
That is "shader crawl" when a 2D shader moves globally through 3D space. Clump has a setting to correct this (a toggle in the shader), but I don't know whether the others (wave, kink, etc) need it. I've used wave in an animated sim, so I suspect they don't...
How do the Guides look when you play them in the timeline? Are they crawling around like that? If not, then it's obviously the shader. I suspect you will have to learn to brush the shape you want, then use the curl tool, then find a compromise between Hair and Style stiffness that still allows the hair to move a bit - but long curly hair doesn't just fly around. They curls actually give hair rigidity so it moves LESS... Even on fine, blonde, thin hair, only the outermost layer will be picked up by wind. Seriously, men don't usually realize this but hair doesn't just "fly around" without a green hair ninja....
You will need to re-intruduce the clump effect in the hair settings.
Yes, the guide hairs crawl each and every frame. Also, when draping, even after the hair has come to rest, the guide hairs jitter back and forth almost like flipping on an axis, back and forth. It's strange. This is where I think that your idea of guide hairs affecting one another might hold a lot of merit. The problem that I've found with having few guide hairs is that hair just fills itself in in the gaps between the guides, which don't seem to respect collision, so the cut through the face and hand down in front of the neck.
I agree with the fly around thing and long curly hair. For this I was using a higher friction against the body, but turned friction off in the above example gif.
Maybe I could save a bunch of time making the hair look that I want without anything else in the scene - so nothing to collide against, and even turn off collision with itself. Record a few dynamic simulations with an alpha channel at several different lengths and widths. If those remain jitter-free, I could use those as animated brushes to paint on over animations shot with the conforming hair. If that would work well, it would save me a lot of time. As important as I consider these practices, my total and absolute failuer so far makes it feel like my life is being sucked out of me by this! :ahhh:
Also, the gif above is the result of colliding only against primitive spheres, with no visible improvement over the results colliding against Phil's Proxy figure.
I just discovered something interesting you may find useful - I tried to create similar hair, just shorter, and was getting the crazy jitter, so I changed the frame rate to 3fps, ran the simulation (which still takes forever) but the jitter disappeared and it interpolates all the frames in between when you change the frame rate back to 24 or 30fps after you complete the simulation.