UHT2: Ultimate Color is a versatile, all inclusive hair texturing solution for Iray renders in Daz Studio. The quality of the hair in your scene can make or break a render, which is why it is so important to start with great textures and shaders. What is UHT2? Universal Hair Textures 2, the much anticipated follow-up to UHT Hair Shaders for Iray.

UHT2: Ultimate Color is a set of custom hair textures and shader presets meant to replace those on Hair Objects that do not have their own Iray material presets. But, UHT2 is so much more than that. With the option to use the original textures that come with the Hair Object in your scene, you have the ability to add just the optimized settings for shine, translucency, and bump that UHT2 has to offer, then further refine those settings with the Utility presets.

UHT2 also has the ability to convert the scalp textures to Iray and apply optimized settings to the scalp, as well as color match the scalp to a wide array of hair colors. But wait, there's more!

UHT2 Color Mixer is a specialized script written to enable you, the artist, to mix your own custom hair colors with an almost endless variety of color variation, highlights, lowlights, balayage, or ombre effects. Color Mixer can be used over ANY hair object with vertically aligned UVs. That includes hair that uses its original textures. UHT2 Color Mixer does not change the shader settings. It only affects the Diffuse and Translucency channels, so mixing the colors over existing textures is quite effective.

Additionally, with UHT2 you have the option to tile the hair textures as many as ten times across the hair model, allowing you to get realistic hair widths no matter the size of the strands on the UV map. Use translucency presets to allow more or less light to pass between the layers of hair, which adds to the richness of the hair model in your renders. Use brightness presets to slightly darken or brighten the hair where needed without actually changing the color or tone of the textures. This is great for adding just a bit of light in darker scenes, or toning down blown out colors from bright lights.

There is no guarantee that UHT2 will work on literally any hair available, but it does work wonders on the vast majority of transmapped hair in your runtime, no matter the vendor, marketplace, figure or generation. Some hair was made with UVs that run horizontally rather than vertically, or the UVs have not been laid out in strips, or maybe there are no UVs at all (such as with some fibermesh hair). These hair objects will not benefit from UHT2 quite as well as hair objects modeled with vertical strips for UVs, but in many cases they can still be improved with the UHT2 settings.

A complete User's Guide in PDF format is supplied in the download, and a series of videos have been made to demonstrate some of the steps and techniques outlined in the guide. At the end of each section, if a video has been made, there will be a link to the video that corresponds to that section. Additionally, a few other videos have been made to demonstrate some layering techniques not explicitly described in this Guide, such as using Color Mixer to create an Ombre Effect to the hair in your scene. All of the User's Guide videos and the additional videos have been collected in a Playlist on YouTube for easier viewing. UHT2 How-To Videos

Be careful, though... the Color Mixer can be quite addictive! Never settle for "almost the right color" again. With UHT2: Ultimate Color, the possibilities are endless.