Emma Hair Issues

bigD3d

Hi,

still new to DAZ so i'm hoping this is something easy. I purchased Emma Hair ( https://www.daz3d.com/emma-hair-for-genesis-3-female-s )  the other day and I have not been able to get 3Delight or Iray to look correctly. I've not had these issues with any other hair i've purchased. When using 3Delight the hair looks faded and plastic and using Iray it starts faded then very quickly it turns completely white. This is true for photoreal or interactive.

I've attached two shots, one showing the 3Delight material rendered in 3Delight with default render settings. The 2nd is Krayon hair and Emma hair in the same scene both with their Iray materials applied and rendered in Iray with default settings.

If anyone knows why this is happening or what I can do to fix it I would be most grateful!

thanks in advance

Edit to fix link

Richard Haseltine

How are you lighting the scene? It looks as if the issue is the glossiness, but I wouldn't expect such an extreme result under common lighting conditions. Which version of Daz Studio is this (Help>About Daz Studio)?

bigD3d

Daz Studio is 4.9.3.166 Pro Edition (64-bit).

For the screenshots I started with a new scene, loaded the hair, selected the material, went to render settings and hit 'Default' to make sure, then rendered. So there's no lights besides whatever lights the scene when you don't add one. I bought TerraDome 3 and have tried using some of the preset Iray settings for daylight as well, but same result.

I put the Krayon hair in the Iray screenshot to show that another hair in the same scene with default light looks fine. Characters, props, landscape, clothes - basically everything I had bought renders fine but this hair.

bigD3d

Richard, looks like you are right about the scene lighting. I checked my Preferences > Scene > Render Settings and noticed 'Record when saving a Scene File' was checked. So I guess on scenes where I was trying out TerraDome daylight stuff I carried over some setting(s) that don't reset when you hit the 'Default' button in the Render Settings.

I unchecked that box so now new scenes won't be influenced from other scenes. And then I saw another Preset called 'AprilYSH Basic Iray' and applied it and the hair renders fine. 

Is there a different way i'm not seeing to get back to a completely default Iray rendering state besides hitting 'Default' and/or applying this 'AprilYSH Basic Iray'?

thanks

 

Richard Haseltine

Default render settings won't remove any actual lights in the scene, but it should reset exposure and environment lighting.

Bluebird 3D

Hi bigD3d!

I am so glad you liked the hair. I am the creator.

It looks like you might have this sorted now but if you need assistance, let me know.

bigD3d

Hi Bluebird3D,

thanks for replying. Unfortunately I continue to have issues with the glossiness of the hair. 

After trying the AprilYSH Basic Iray render preset (which seems to have come with Frazier hair for G2M) and seeing the hair render normally I thought i'd be ok. But unfortunately that preset is the only Iray preset I own that seems to work. Every other preset makes the white hair effect. Since i'm not planning to use the AprilYSH render preset for my scenes the hair is sadly sitting idle. I'm not versed enough in DAZ 's render or shader settings yet to know how to fix it.

Also, part of the problem may be how DAZ carries over render settings from scene to scene - as well as what the 'Default' button the Render Settings does or doesn't do. When I found the Render settings in Preferences (noted above in my prior post) I thought this would make every 'New' scene start with some kind of Default render setting, but it doesn't appear to. I can use a Terra Dome 3 Preset, render, hit the 'Default' button, create a new scene, and still have some of those TD3 settings. For instance the dome is gone, but the light still shines from the same direction. So hitting 'Default' in the Render Settings doesn't seem to reset everything regardless of Iray or 3Delight. This leaves me not knowing what is truly 'Default' when rendering without going into every single property. So I have to assume that the white hair results from some combination of my render settings and what is or is not carried over from the various Presets i've got, and the Iray Material settings on the hair.

That said, it still concerns me that I only get the issue using your hair. So here's another set of screenshots showing the hair in combination with other hair i've bought from other vendors. Regardless of what my render settings are, they don't seem to effect the other hairs (or figures or props).

For the screenshots there are no extra lights in any of the shots. I believe the Terra Dome 3 uses the HDRI sky which provides the daylight and I think i've read somewhere that when you use the default camera it uses the camera headlamp. For all the screenshots I loaded the hair, selected the Iray Material for it, repeated for each hair, and then went to Render Settings to select the Preset and/or hit the Default button - and then rendered.

I would also mention that I have recently re-installed DAZ Studio and re-downloaded my entire content purchases about 2 weeks ago so i'm assuming there's nothing corrupted in my setup.

Any insight into what's going on would be greatly appreciated as I very much want to use your hair product!

thanks in advance

Redz

I don't own this hair, but it migjt be worth checking in the surfaces tab if backscattering  is set on for it. I've found that can sometimes cause artifacts similar to this, especially with the default headlamp on. 

bigD3d

Redz,

thanks for the reply. The hair had a backscattering value of .0010, but making it zero removed the white! Two of the hairs in my screenshots have a value for backscattering, but other setting in the Base > Glossy area were different so I guess the combinations of those make it so they work. I'm not going to try to figure out which does what today, i'm just happy I can use the hair.

Thanks for finding the culprit!

bigD3d

Just in case this helps anyone else, based on Redz comments about the default headlamp I tested with adding a camera to the scene and then turned off it's headlamp. Rendering from the new camera made the white hair go away without modifying the backscattering to zero. The color of the hair deepened to what I originally expected to see too. Looks like some growing pains here and I need to get in the habit of setting up cameras and turning off headlamps for my future projects. 

Thanks again for everyone who replied.

Redz

Happy to have helped.I'm not sure if the headlamp reaction to backscattering is a glitch or simply the lighting physics.