Welcome to the official forum topic for all things hair related. Here we can discuss tips, tricks, problems, etc. related to using AM's awesome suite of hair tools. I'll start off by (finally) posting instructions on how to use the new hair shaders included with AM.

This sounds interesting. Are you done working on the hair shaders or are you still fine tuning them?
Will you be doing sully's hair here?

Yeeeeeehaaaaaaa!!!!!! WooooHooooo!!!

I've been working on Happy Bear again... I suck at hair... so of course... 3 completely hairy main characters.

Only the government can make being "rendered" feel this scary.

-vern

w00h00! thanks, looking forward to the tutorial.

This will be very welcome Iv been longing to use the hair shader ,Thank's Kevin

I am soooooo happy to see this. I've been playing with the new hair as well and have come across some interesting findings. I'll post some of them later if no one beats me to them. What would be nice is to see a tutorial on the best way (or a way that works) to apply particle hair to a model and comb it to actually look and react like hair. I have a theory, though I can't test it now. To take and group each patch of the models head, ie patch001, patch002, and then apply hair to each individual patch, combing and lengthing as needed. Anyone care to try this for me (I'm at work and don't have access to my system here).

Just for refrence = Bow: 100% = round hair 0% = flat hair particles
Set your thickness to 0.02 and then set density to 300 or 350
Specular Renderer = Mulhair
Diffuse Renderer = Mulhair
These settings give a pretty good look.

Great! We needed this forum for some time now...

Don't do that - once those hairs stick to your tongue they're a real pig to get out again.

I can't wait to see what people do -- so I can steal, um I mean, learn from your methods .

Seriously though, I also suck at hair and grateful for this forum.

Glad to see there's so much interest in this topic (I figured there would be).



The 2 hair shaders in V13 are done unless someone finds problems with it. Probably best to submit a bug report if you find anything. I will be working on another shader for V14 that should take the realism up a notch. I do plan to finish Sully up soon, I've got some other things I've got to finish first. I will be posting his progress here of course...



What are the bears more afraid of?



I'd be interested to hear what you've found. I'm not sure applying to each patch would be necessary, unless you are trying to create cornrows or something. I'll be posting the work I'm doing on Woot that might be helpful.

Kevin

Cool. The only thing of interest that I've found is that say you take a sphere and apply hair to it with a length of 10 cm and 2 cps. When you begin shaping the hair there is generally two control strings near the top of the sphere that just won't comb down. They tend to bend and give the hair a mushroom-like apperance.
That's the reason I was wondering would it be easier to apply to patches and then shape the hair, or perhaps use diffrent legths of hair and shape as needed.
One last thing, does anyone know if the number of control points has any effect what-so-ever in shaping and controling the hair? As far as I can tell it makes little diffrence, unless I'm mising something.

Have any of you played with tree hair?

That is where you use an image if a tree with the hair emitter to create forests.

It works good except there were some issues in NR that made me stop using them.

David

does anyone know if the number of control points has any effect what-so-ever in shaping and controling the hair? As far as I can tell it makes little diffrence, unless I'm mising something.

Yea it makes a lotta differance ,it allows you to place the hair just where you want ,like using cp's in a model
it seems that moving the hair around has got much better in 13 or is that my imagination

Just hide patches that you don't want to see while grooming. then you limit the number of guide hairs you have to keep up with at once.

To make a "part" in the hair, it is better if you are using a skullcap just below the surface to emit your hair--that way you can split up the skullcap at parts, so that you can get the extra guides to groom with. Otherwise you will have to use a direction map to control a part, and that is tricky to paint.

Ah I was wandering why use a skull cap and not the patches directly ,thank's for that Will

Ya, I've started using the skull-cap last night. You say that I can control individual cps of the hair, but how? The only cp I'm allowed to move is the end cp, the others just sort of swing around following the end cp. Is this a bug or am I missing something?
Hide patches! I shoulda thought of that before! Thanks Will. That never really occured to me.

You should be able to grab the other cp's and move those around as well. You can also turn on FK mode (the default is IK), which I find is a little easier to tweak with.

How do I turn on FK mode? I noticed one button in the right that has an FK/IK on it. Does that toggle it on and off?

WoooHooo!

Kevin,

Gary the Gopher likes his new hair so much he would like to meet you in the Enchanted Forrest for a "roll in the hay"... or as Happy Bear says:

"A roll in the heyvern"

(p.s. this is just a joke I assure you. I am not hitting on you. I support all lifestyle choices... but I don't actually participate. I am just happy to have some nice hair... uh... for my characters.)

-Vern

Sounds like that might be it. I can't check now but I thought it just said FK.



Whoa there Gary, I'm glad you like your hair but I'm a happily married man and I'm not really into gophers. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I mean, if a man and a beast want to be together that's their right, as long as it's consensual of course. And thank you Vern for totally derailng this topic

Well, you can move and manipulate the cps will IK and FK
Here are some test renders I did last night with various shaders. It's just a simply model in a default Chor with default lighting and AO.

The first one with the darker hair was done with hair density set at 200%, thickness set to 0.01, and I used the Muhair shader on both specularity and diffuse. Also the brightness is set to about 75% which really had the biggest effect. Bow was set to 100% and kinkiness set to 0%.

The other three are with brightness set to 100% and density set to 300%. You can see the diffrence that brightness has on your over all hair effect. Also by setting the thickness up to 1.5% or above you start getting hair that looks more like threads of yarn.

I shaped the hair by combing individual strands and then pulling the cps in place using the FK button. I hope these help someone a little.

The last three shots look roughly 2 minutes to render out. The last took 2 and a half minutes but that was with multi-pass X16. Not to shabby. Check out my profile for system specs. Anyway I hope this helps someone out there in HASH land.

finaly its way past time for this!

Just got the new AM v15J. I attempted to render an image using Hair and noticed render times were around 21 minutes. It never actually finished because of my impatience. Does anyone have any scores for render times with hair? I'm using a intel Quad 2.66 Ghz with 4 gig of ram. Or if there is a problem with version 15J, could someone point me in the direction of a fix.

Assuming you didn't just typo that about v15j... install the v16 release candidate. It reportedly renders a whole lot faster. (I don't really track rendering times because as far as Im concerned any amount of time rendering is too much time)

As far as a fix is concerned, we would have to know more about what variables you have in your project.
The primary fix is to optimize your project.

Hair is a complicated thing and takes time. A head of hair is several thousand times more patches than a bald head.

If you turn off self shadowing in the hair properties that will go faster.

A z-buffered kleig light will usually be faster than a ray traced one.


But you've done hair before v15... can you show some render time comparisons of the same model ?

Hair in A:M is surprisingly a fast render option. It was in 15, and it's even better in 16. I have spent WAY TOO MUCH time messing with hair... and have gotten some amazing results for the price (I'm happy with my latest test, attached) In this test, I am 'letting her hair down... and back up' thru a hairstyle pose slider. This uses 2 different hair materials (long and short) FORCES are employed to add a modicum of styling (the 'part' in the front) and collision detection. Full size render is 480 X 640 at 4 passes WITH muhair shader, fastAO and shadows, plus SSS and it only took under 2 minutes per frame on V16/32 bit...

As stated above... you would really need to divulge more info on what you are attempting before any of us could spot the render hangup.

I firmly believe that A:M's hair feature is as good as or better than most of the other softwares out there. It is complicated a bit... and lots of experimentation(time) is needed to heed good results- but that fact is true for other softwares as well.

If you could post a screen grab of your hairs property box... I'd gladly take a look.

WARNING: GIRL IN BIKINI not suitable for all parties.