Daz3d Dforce Hair
Berniece Leonhardt
However, dForce has been a hit and miss. The hair appears to be thin, especially near the forehead. I could try different poses and what not, and keep experimenting, but after dozens of simulations and hours, dForce simply looks bad, from almost every angle. Each time, it's the same issue. There is not enough hair where it should, so the model appears to have thinning hair. I am not even using any hair morphs or styles that come with the product. Just attaching it to the model as it is and running the simulation. Vanilla usage.
I thought, I was making a mistake, until I saw this product listing.
-neroli-hair-for-genesis-8-and-genesis-3-females
The promo images are from the vendor (who assume must be an expert with Daz, unlike me). Even the vendor cannot seem to avoid a small patch of thin hair on the forehead. Is this vendor and me, both suffering from isolated issues of incorrect dForce usage? Or, dForce Hair really is not good? Perhaps the technology is not as mature as dForce clothing, may be?
Wish to know from other users.
Meanwhile, even when I using dForce hair, I have gone back to using AutoFit without dForce, and its far better. At least there is no thinning, bald effect.
There are two types of dforce hair, the old cloth based types and the new strand based which is what this hair is. Strand based tends to be on the thin side as you have noted, but the cloth based one are really beautiful looking, but take more resources.
Agreed about some of the hairs, but I love dforce hairs because it makes them look more natural. Chevybabe25 did change the hair caps on Neroli Hair theres a thread here. Chevybabe25 is also fast to respond and give help. If you search for Neroli hair you will find a post from Chevybabe25 in Novica's Art Studio thread that has some tips on adjusting the hair. Chevybabe25 also has a thread for her dforce hairs that has tips in it also. Lindays hairs are awesome as FSMCDesigns states!
FSMC and Daven,
Thank you for your response. Thank you for the additional notes and recommendations. I will look into the suggested products, and pick them up in my next purchase cycle.
I will also look at the threads.
Biggest problem I've found is that hair just does not conform to custom/more extreme morphs resulting in hair inside the head or just plain distorted - I can't see a way to re-seat the SBH on the scalp mesh. If there are morphs to bring the hair out it doesn't simulate properly. Not to mention I think a lot of the materials shipped with hair just don't look right. Quite often even the promos are a blurry mess (I assume this is too much reliance on fill hairs and not enough on guide hairs - fill hairs just interpolate between guides therefore not enough difference). Short body/vellus hair looks about the best use so far. A shame, because if these issues were solvable I'd be on this like white on rice.
Frinkky
Thank you for sharing your experience on the hair thing. That's precisely what I am going through. After my fabolous experience with dForce clothing (the final effect is suble but elegant), I too had high hopes for dForce Hair.
Now, I will still buy and use but with reservations.
There is some serious beauty in dforce hair, but you have to know what you are doing and have a strong enough computer to handle it. If there isnt enough hair in one spot, you just add more. The key is knowing how to do it :) I have a dforce hair thread that I want to encourage everyone that has any interest in these hairs to read through. Yep, its kinda complicated and takes some time to learn, but the pros outweigh the cons. Stop in, and ask a question. Im here to help.
Also, that promo you linked to was not done by me, but by an outside daz artist. Looking at it, Im betting he turned down the tesselation to render it on his machine. Which there lies the other problem. These hairs need resources. They are heavy :(
Chevy,
I must confess, that store listing images, with that patch of hair on the forehead...ewww...that sort of killed my mojo towards that product and also dForce in general. It was like a 'impression' on my mind. I am not able to drive that out of my mind, unfortunately. It's like a memory scar :) But I understand the artist who made it has made a mistake.
A very visible mistake with repurcussions to sales, unfortunately.
Further, I will check out that thread. As with so many other things with Daz 3D (and 3D art in general), there is a bit of learning curve. I ended up learning up HDRIs only a week ago, and that happened accidentally when I was playing around with Sun/Sky settings. So, I am sure, I will eventually figure out the dForce Hair thing. Initially, I remember, I gave up on dForce clothing as well! Now, I love it, especially when I am working with complex poses where regular fitting looks odd.
I am not out of the dForce Hair camp. However, perhaps, I just need to play around witih the one hair I already own before I start buying more hair things. Also, unlike clothing, to me at least, non-dForce hair seems to work just fine on most of the occasions. Without all the extra work load of simulation and processing hair.
But, yes, I promise, i will revist the dForce Hair in a few weeks/months. Thank you for your advice.
No worries, Jay. Yeah, the original skullcap in those promos was not a good choice. I don't blame you for feeling the way you do. I want to stress that knowledge is power, and I don't mind sharing what I know :)
A little while ago I came across this little gem of a tutorial video by Parmy Baddhan on how to add, dforce to non dforce hair and it works a treat to a point.. As I have found that certain hair types such as those that use wide strip polys for the hair, tend not to look so well when they are simulated..
The hair that Parmy uses for this tutorial is the Voss hair that comes with Vicky 8 as it has smaller strands of polys, so any hair like that works better with dForce.. One big thing that is mentioned in the video, is that this method does not work to well with hair that does not have a hair cap/scalp..
Ahh doh I knew there was a reason I never posted about this before, I completely forgot about that product, and true dforce specific hair does work better to a point.. Problem is that I have had a couple of dforce hair products, that take forever to start rendering due to the amount of geometry data they use..
I find dforce hair quick to render; simulating can be time-consuming for some of them, but then lots of gravity can help. Gravity is a quickfix that often works, and when it doesn't getting creative with settings works.
I suppose it could be the type as I do have some dforce hair products that do render fast.. It is just these few hair products that for reasons I don't know they take ages to initialize, and start rendering and when they do render just the hair itself will take up to nearly 7GB of vram..
I decided to finally try my own dForce fur creation and created a sphere primitive to which I applied a dynamic surface. There are various simulation settings but nothing like in the dForce hair items or tutorials?
Only PAs can create dForce hair (I mean actual dForce hair, as opposed to polygon hair using dForce cloth engine). What you see when you apply a dynamic surface modifier are the parameters for dForce cloth engine.
Ah okay. That's a bummer and a bit confusing since there are tutorials floating around which seem to indicate you can in fact apply dForce on any hair (which made me assume it is available for any objects) - but perhaps those items were already dForce compatible.
1) Hair which use the "dForce Hair" engine, like this one: -redz-kaz-hair-for-genesis-9 (listing"dForce Hair" in compatible software)
These are strand-based hair (created with the system available in DS or any of the various strand hair systems from other software) converted to use dForce Hair engine. Only PAs have the tools to do that conversion.
2) Hair which use the "dForce cloth" engine, like this one: -wet-style-curly-hair-for-genesis-8-and-9 (listing"dForce Cloth" in compatible software)
These hairs are "polygon hairs" ie they're made from a bunch of transmapped flat ribbons of polygons representing a bunch of hair strands, and dForce cloth properties have been added to those ribbons so they can be simulated.
You can create that kind of dForce Hair by applying a dForce modifier to any polygon hair. But it won't have the same dForce properties as the first kind of dForce hair.
Anyhow. I got pretty interesting results by combining Oso's creature fur with strand based hair and some other stuff. Now I'm just curious if there's anywhere a document reference for what exactly do those dforce hair values do or if someone could clarify if I got anything right below..
Hair Density: You can add a mask here which determines how dense the hair is in any given area (white = more hair is generated, black = no hair is generated) but what is the difference between PS Hair Density and Additional PR Hairs density?
Interpolation Segment Lenght: Based on strand based hair this seems to be the length of a segment so a lower value would have more segments and a higher less. I'd guess at a lower value you could get smoother bends.
Single Guide Strength: I assume this has something to do with how accurately hair follows guide hairs but I don't believe we can edit guide hairs for dForce because of the "available only for PAs reason"?
Clumping Curves Density: I assume this is like with strand based-hair. Value 1 clumps larger segments and value 2 smaller segments. That being said I'm not entirely sure how it reacts to any map. Is it like with density map where white values are affected more and black less with greys controlling how strong the effect is in any given area? I don't understand why it seems to do finer clump if you run higher density here rather than lower density? Then there are the parameters:
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