Quick Hair Animation
PhilW
Posts: 5,145
I have been working on a new hair product (or even a line of products!) which has a number of benefits over previous Carrara hairs:
- they can be used on any figure;
- they have procedurally generated stray hairs for added realism;
- shaders have been improved;
- they can be animated realistically!
Here is a quick WIP to show how the animation is looking. Any feedback and suggestions gratefully received.
I should mention that I am indebted to Jon Stark for his work earlier in the year on animating hair in Carrara.4
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Comments
Looks great Phil! :) I especially love the concept of adding the small 'strays', and it's a very nice and believable style and movement.
+1
In the cart as soon as they are available!
looks like a bunch of fishing line
looking good..
will it be in a variety of styles & lengths etc...
Look great, Phil!
I am looking to do a number of styles, but it will partly depend on how well the first ones sell as to how many I end up doing.
Thanks for the feedback guys - if you have any particularly style you like, maybe post a link to a picture here and I'll see what I can do.
As a footnote, if you do a Google Image search on stray hairs, it is all about how to remove them from images in Photoshop. So 3D is trying to become more like the real world, while the real world is trying to look more like a 3D render!
Looks very good, Phil. I recall many years ago at a 3D conference in San Francisco, I asked a panel of pros about animating hair. I think they were mostly game programmers, and basically said they were not given "enough polys" to do much. So it was helmets and masks ... maybe helmet hair. Then along came "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" (2001), and everybody was amazed at the realism, especially the hair. Although not everybody: " ... some scenes have a too blatant 'look what we can do' boast to them. Particularly all the scenes of Aki's hair waving in the wind." I've always avoided realistic (stranded) hair, worried about render time (keep in mind I'm permanently in 48 Hour Film mode), but if what you're doing can render in reasonable time, I'm in.
It was only 640x480, but rendered around 1 min per frame with two lights plus Sky Lighting. A tip - if you are using soft shadows on your lights, duplicate them and have one with soft shadows which excludes hair, and one without soft shadows that lights only the hair. Soft shadows don't add much to rendered hair, except increasing render time significantly.
I don't animate but those are so cool (I'd viewed yours before, Jon).
Thank you both for so much hard work you put into doing hair. It's appreciated so much as many of these kinds of things can be used for stills.
Cheers! x SileneUK
Sounds like a good tip, thanks.
Sounds like a good tip, thanks.
Yes, I agree.
Thanks for the tip, Phil.
For what it's worth, I've found that Carrara hair dynamic hair renders faster than traditional transmapped hair. Depending on the complexity of the transmapped hairstyle, Carrara hair can be quite a bit faster. One thing that can increase the render time for Carrara hair is the actual number of hairs used; 100,000 hairs is going to take a good bit longer to render than 5,000. The neat thing is that with clever use of haircaps you don't need to have a huge haircount and especially in animation a lot of time there is no visible difference between a hairstyle that has 120,000 hairs and one that has 15,000, so you don't really need to have huge haircounts. Even with high haircounts though, I've found most of the time it will render faster than transmapped hair. It's almost like there's no downsides to Carrara hair, which is why I love it so much :)
That sounds good for fast animations, thanks. I confess I have not used Carrara dynamic hair much, but I picked up several recently at one of DAZ's quick sales. My previous comment was based on Poser format stranded hair (Neftis?) which looks great but renders slow, at least for my purposes (again, 5 minute animation in two days). So I need to try the Carrara dynamic hair ... and several hundred other items I've picked up, before the mid-August Houston 48 Hour Film contest. (Our team name is "Perfect Time To Panic Productions", a comment on the situation immediately after the Friday night kickoff meeting for the two day contest.) :coolcheese:
I am looking to do a number of styles, but it will partly depend on how well the first ones sell as to how many I end up doing.
Thanks for the feedback guys - if you have any particularly style you like, maybe post a link to a picture here and I'll see what I can do.
As a footnote, if you do a Google Image search on stray hairs, it is all about how to remove them from images in Photoshop. So 3D is trying to become more like the real world, while the real world is trying to look more like a 3D render!
question, is there anyway to do a ponytail, and have it move like the video you posted?
question, is there anyway to do a ponytail, and have it move like the video you posted?
I believe it's possible, but I admit my own attempts have not done as well as I would like. I originally envisioned simply taking a long hairstyle and then pulling it through a torus object at the back of the head that would naturally hold it in place. I have no idea why, but the hair wants to slip through the torus. If I use several cylinders arrayed in a circle overlaying each other, it seems to work ok though, but it takes time to set up the sim and bring the hair into position. I'm thinking the better way might be to have the top hair pulled into a 'shape' where it converges at the back of the head but is basically not moving that much in the simulation (meaning the shape strength setting would be set high) and then have a 2nd hair region on only one or 2 poly's just below where the ponytail would come out of, with a high hair density, but loosely flowing hairs, that are held in place by some primitives at the root (again, maybe my multiple cylinder idea). Then maybe a 3rd hair region of a few loose hairs towards the front of the head, to simulate hair that has 'slipped' out of the ponytail holder and falling naturally along the sides of the head.
I fooled with this on and off, got a little frustrated with my results, moved onto another shiny glittery thing and told myself I would come back to it, but I still believe it's doable. PhilW might have a more ingenious method or approach to the concept (or anyone else that might chime in to give some ideas too :) )
If I get a ponytail up and working, which I still hope to do, I'll put up an animation to show and hopefully an example on sharecg for folks to play with. If all ends in disaster, I'll own up to it too :)
The head hair on a ponytail would remain static so two sets ot hair really needed.
One not simulated styled to a stub then a hidden mesh on the stub with a long pony tail grown off it.
But I find sach tails be it on people or horses thrash and splay a lot in Carrara.
True it could splay a lot, but this may be one scenario where less guide hairs is preferable (the less guide hairs there are, the less 'parts' of the hair there are to splay from each other). Add in a bit of clump in the shader to keep the hairs naturally wanting to stay closer to each other and I think it could work well. I'll have to return to my original experiments and fiddle a bit :)
I did start doing a ponytail hair - it might be one of the working files included in "Realism in Carrara" come to think of it - but did not really try to animate it. But I certainly think the non-moving hair on the top of the head needs to be separate from the moving tail, either as a completely separate hair, or as hair groups (you can set the dynamic properties separately per group so this should work). As Jon says, you won't need many guide hairs. I might give it a try soon.
Could the brush, etc. be used to create a spiral of hair and then model a band or knot, and then do a dynamic? Guess I'm asking if a vertex object for a band or knot could be used like a hair clip in the dynamics calculation.
In theory yes, but it remains to be seen if there would be issues when you do it. To get the hair to settle through a torus might mean having a very low collision distance, which may not be appropriate for the rest of the simulation.
I am currently experimenting with using a small hemisphere to grow the hair on. You could add a band for decoration, but I am thinking of excluding it from the dynamics calculations. I currently have a stable animation but the movement is not as natural as I want so still playing with the dynamics parameters.
This is something I'm working on for my character ...
Planning to do static hair on scalp and dynamic tail on blue area of the hair tie.
Dunno if it's gonna work, but I will try later today, BTW, scalp and tie mesh are one object with 3 different shading domains :lol:
I have my test animation done - still a work in progress but shows that something passable is possible.
http://youtu.be/TvK7OEXJbZg
All feedback welcomed.
5thElement - very neat modelling!
Thanks Phil.
Here is a very crude test (low hair count) of the idea ...
Shading for the tail itself needs to be fixed, of course (root color needs to be lighter then on the rest of it) :-)
You guys are getting me excited about the ponytail concept! Really neat work, and so quickly done too :)
PhilW's test might be crude but I think it proves the concept can work, and 5th Element I love that styling you came up with, it's pretty much exactly what I pictured in my head and looks great.
I've got to go mow the lawn, and the 'drive' on my mower is broken so it will be a heck of a workout pushing that beast around (and sadly I've got a pretty big yard) so I'll have to wait til later today to play, but I'm itching to get back into the 'swing' of things on this ponytail idea :)
I just for my own curiosity tried the moda cuts as is in Carrara render and Octane
i did some thinking about the idea of the ponytail and like some of the previous poster posted, the two hair idea seems like the best course of action. I'm just glad that a simple suggestion/idea got so much attention and hopefully though everybody's work a new hair style can become widely known and common place.