Hair Room
danketchum32_66b4a02676
Posts: 20
Can someone point me to some rendered stills or even better some animation (with dynamics) of the results you can get with the Hair Room? I want to see if it can do a reasonable job with flowing hair. Thanks.
Comments
The set up for dynamic hair for stills vs. animation is going to be quite different. My system is older, so I tend to use the dynamic hair for stills. I love it!
There are some caveats though. It's a render time effect, so it doesn't play nice with other render time effects such as the light cone, DOF or volumetrics. If you need dynamic hair and a light cone, add the light cone in post by rendering it out by itself and compositing later. For the volumetric clouds, if you have the hair in front to the clouds it will work just fine, but if you have the hair behind the cloud or within the cloud, it won't work right.
All these use dynamic hair.
Have a look at my Renderosity gallery - almost all of my images feature Carrara hair (at the risk of self promotion, I also have some for sale here in the Daz Marketplace).
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=380840
http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=philw&x=0&y=0
Animation is a different matter. Dynamic hair does not animate well with standard figures - too many polygons to calculate - so I tend to use a low-poly proxy as the collision object, which works much better (and calculates faster too). You can get my V4 lo-poly proxy on the link below, there is also a link to the kind of results you can get.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/51666/browse/5/3D-Model/Lo-Res-V4-Proxy-Figure
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLn1DQmsR6U
Cool. Looks like it does pretty well. Thanks guys. I just ordered a new computer and I thought with the much greater horse power it might be able to handle this kind of thing (which would probably crash my old eMachine in a second). Now to save up for Carrara. :)
The great thing about the hair is all the stuff you can use it for that you may not even think about using it for.
Using hair for grass is pretty popular. I've even used it for a mossy rock.
Love your renders, Evil. I'm an old Vue user (Vue 5) and I always loved God Rays. Usually I found it easier to just add them in Photoshop. The latest Vue versions are just to pricey for my taste, plus despite the exporters in Daz Studio it's apparently very hard to get the models into Vue. I tried the latest Vue PLE and the Collada export from Daz left a lot to be desired. So I'll probably spring for Carrara Pro.
Thanks for the nice words!
The rays in the moss picture were rendered in Carrara, with the same light, but I hid everything else and rendered them with an alpha channel so I could composite in Photoshop. The light uses a gel and the rays are really a 3D light cone set so that the gel creates a shadow. If I had used a multi- colored gel, it would have looked like it was shining through a stained glass window.
I rendered the light cone separately because as I mentioned, the light cone and the hair don't work well together.!
The light rays for the airship picture are spot lights shining through volumetric clouds. The hair on the figure works because it's in front of, and not intersecting the clouds.
I use Carrara 7.2 Pro, which has a light cone, but no real god rays. Carrara 8 and onwards do have god rays (Sunbeams). I don't know how well they work with the hair.
When you are able to get Carrara, I think you'll be glad you did! I know from my perspective, it's one of the best software investments I've ever made. It's right up there with Final Cut Pro and Photoshop.
Hi regaltwo.
Youtube especialy(Carrara dynamic hair), and products images for dynamic hair at DAZ are a few places to see hair in action. Dynamic Hair is one of Carrara's best top 5 features(imho). One issue currently with dynamic hair animations is that the hair doesn't like to be in enclosed object(s). This includes just being between two separate walls. Also what EP mentioned in some areas. Hopefully these will be fixed in C8.5.x or C9.
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@evilproducer.
Have you tried using a Box shape thick volumetric cloud for sunbeams/fog. Carrara Hair should be OK with this method. For some reason, only the Realistic Sky seems to affect the hair when its enabled. The light cone and DOF effect seems to work OK in my testing, only the hair appears to be always faced towards the camera maybe causing shadow/shading(?) effects. I'll recheck and do some more research. :)
I'm using C7. When I get a chance, I'll post some images of what a light cone does to dynamic hair when I use it. I'll post one with clouds as well.
BTW, that's a great tip about using the clouds to create a light cone. I already do it myself as it's faster than using the light through transparency option in the light cone's editor. I'd post a great example, but I would violate DAZ's TOS. There's boobies. ;-)
Hi EP.
I'm getting my other mostly offline computer ready so I can post more pictures,...and was going to ask what issues you had with fog and volumetrics with hair. Looking forward to seeing the images. :)
When you look close(inches from) the hair, it appears that they have structure that will face the camera. I was thinking this could be the reason the light cone effects or DOF are wrong.
I did quite a bit of testing for the VC box shape trick for sun/light beams and you can actually use it for indoor scenes too. Depending on magnitude scales you might have to duplicate clouds to make them thick enough. But the results are VERY nice looking volumetrics.
Well, I'm going to have to change my view. I could swear I have had issues with dynamic hair rendering while in a volumetric cloud. I did a couple test renders and they came out fine. The 3D light cone came out as expected- badly. ;-)
The top left has no light cone or clouds. The top right has a light cone and the hair almost looks like a ghost image. The final picture is within a cloud and the hair looks fine.
Thanks for posting images EP. :)
I haven't been able to pin down the issue with hair and the spotlight light cone effect yet. The other issues with hair not rendering correct are; Atmosphere->Realistic Sky with hair in a volumetric cloud, Distance Fog and Cloudy Fog. Sky is OK so far. Then issues with Fog/Cloud primitives.
Thanks for posting the images and this information. I am new to Carrara (love it!) and was playing with the dynamic hair some. I still need to work on just general stuff but was very interesting. Seeing what you can achieve with it for your post is great!