Preview - First Look at Avalon Hair for Genesis 3 Male (& Female)

avmorgan

After a year of health and housing problems, I am back on track in pursuit of becoming a Daz PA. That's my main motivation to sit down and actually build something, start to finish! I just finished my test renders on this new hair model, and already have a few fixes to make after seeing how the rigging and texturing went. I'm going with a rigged ponytail, though I plan to add a few shape morphs too. Right now, the ponytail pulls free of the head, so I have to sink the roots into the head a bit to compensate. Like all good creations, this hair model was inspired by the need for something that suited the character I was working on. Every ponytail I looked at was either designed for a female figure or had too high a hairline (they all made the character, Avalon, look too old). So, I made a list of features I liked and fired up Blender.

Here's the initial result: 

 

Griffin Avid

After a year of health and housing problems, I am back on track in pursuit of becoming a Daz PA. 

Congratulations on your return. Welcome...er...like I was here before....lol

Would br great if the hair could wrap around the shoulder and be draped down the chest area with some morphs to move it away from the surface, like if they had a thick jacket on...

And morphs that account for wind- even though a thick pont-tail wouldn't respond so greatly, but there's a lot of fantasy renders...

Good luck.

avmorgan

Thanks! I don't fault anyone for transience on forums; I have a hard time finding the time to hang out, myself. I pop in and out based on what I'm working on at the moment. 

I don't mind feature requests, and welcome any suggestions people care to share. I was able to get pretty good posability, but the front drape definately needs a better rooted ponytail to pull off! I'll try to share some mobility renders when I get that fixed. 

I figure the bangs and the tips of the ponytail will need their own breeze morphs, the rigging is good enough for winds strong enough to lift it, and then there's gravity effects... got that covered!

I can use the luck! After all, I'm not a PA yet!

Llynara

Welcome back and the hair looks very good. We can always use more hairs for the men. I think this one looks like it would do nicely in historical as well as fantasy renders. The texture looks great too.

Serene Night

It is a nice start. The  hairlines of men are quite different from those of women, and you made a good start giving him sideburns but the top looks a bit more like a female  hairline than would be typical of a man with such a tightly pulled back style. 

avmorgan

Thanks, Llynara & Serene Night. Serene, this particular hair style was designed for a 17 year-old. I intend to add some hairline adjustment morphs, so older males can use it, of course, but I wasn't able to find a suitably masculine style for a low-hairline male (and they're out there, with tons of photo reference on Google images). I'm going to have to try again on my scalp opacity, to get a little better showing on the sideburns; my uv ended up with a really tiny area devoted to the sideburns and I was too cautious on my first pass.

BBIAB with the fixes for the tail. Still a bit of stretching (a little too much deformation of the hair tie), but I've got the rigging improved to allow for an over-the-shoulder pose. The test render should be done in about 10 min or so...

,,,took a little longer than that, but here it is:

 

nonesuch00

Even for a 17 year old male that is a feminine hair style because of the hairline in the front, even most women have less of a 'feminine hairline' then that and the result is that it looks like the hairline of a doll.

avmorgan

Fair point, nonesuch00, but again, there are lots of men with this kind of hairline. For men who don't, there will be hairline adjustment morphs. I plan to add "fit to" morphs for male and female figures I have in my library. I like to have a lot of flexibility in my models; the finished product should be flexible enough for use with any character you want to use it with.

Serene Night

You can see some great images of men's hairlines here. Hairlines

 

avmorgan

I was able to figure out what was causing the root of the ponytail to pull away. I needed to add an extra bone to the rigging, which made it much easier to bring the tail over the shoulder. You can see that in the more recent test renders. These are the first two hairline morphs; one to raise the hairline and one to add a peak: 

 

avmorgan

Thanks for the link, Serene Night. 

Xenomorphine

For what it's worth, I'd love a version of this for G3F with a much shorter (possibly length-morphable) ponytail. All the ones in the store at present have the ponytail too high up for my project needs. Near the base of the skull, like this, would be fantastic.

avmorgan

I was planning on fitting this to G3F figures, as well as the males (the ones I have, at any rate), so I guess this would technically be a G3M & F prop. I've seen a few in the store.

Since my last post, I've rigged the bangs, too. So, now all the loose hair is poseable. I guess you could even turn the bangs and tail off and just go for the slicked back head hair... though with the bangs off, and the hairline morphs on, you can see the "dent" where the bangs should be. Also, you could adjust the length through the rigging; just scale down the bones to the desired length.

 

avmorgan

Xenomorphine, here's what shrinking the tail thru the rigging looks like. For the heck of it, I'm making a length morph, too. It'll be quicker and easier to adjust one slider, as opposed to 7. Edit: The second pic shows how that turned out.

 

avmorgan

This is the first time I've noticed it, but Auto-Fit removes the rigging and weight maps from the hair, so I had to create a G3F version of Avalon Hair to make it work properly on the female G3 figures.

avmorgan

Somehow, I kept messing up my rigging and weight maps, so I had to repeat a bit of work to get the first auto-fit morph done, for Michael 7. For his test renders, I switched to a new hair color (basically, I'll be matching hair color to eyebrow color based on what's available for a given character). I also rendered each test with a different hairline--low, medium and high:

 

nonesuch00

You should make a morph for a detachable ponytail too or create a material zone and a preset to hide the ponytail.

avmorgan

nonesuch00, the ponytail can be turned off in the scene tab, bone-by-bone, or using the material zones and cutout opacity. If there was a way to control visibility with one click, that'd be best. Hmmm. Maybe a scale-to-zero control morph? I'll see if I can do that.

...so scaling down to zero causes weird deformations. Fortunately, I figured out how to create a boolean control property set to toggle the visibility on all the ponytail bones with one click. I put it under the Display properties as "Hide Ponytail". Thanks for the suggestion!

avmorgan

Progress is on pause while I try to figure out why I can't set up the G3F version as a conforming item without a 7cm offset. The problem seems to be some under-hairline geometry, though I didn't have a problem with it on the G3M version. It didn't even come up until I autofit the geometry to G3F (I accidentally skipped over that part and went into transferring the rigging and weightmaps from the male version to the female (remodeled to fit G3F by default to avoid the eyelashes and the resulting distortion of the bangs). On the plus side, the male version seems to accept the different shapes in my runtime without issues, so not much need for custom fits.

I could just subtract that 7cm from the "head" position, but it's going to bug me until I figure out exactly what's causing it, so I can avoid that problem in the future. TTFN

avmorgan

Okay, back again. The problem I was having was in the rigging; it didn't manifest until I tried to "fit to" Victoria 7. The 7cm displacement was essentially due to a slight head height difference between G3M and G3F present in the rigging. When I tried to transfer the rigging from my original model to the G3F version, it shifted the hair from the modeled position to the G3M head position. Which meant that I had to re-rig from scratch. I'll also have to make adjustments to the morphs created for the G3M version, when I transfer them, next. 

Until then, here's the rigged female version: 

 

avmorgan

Here's the test renders for use on Lucian 7, with a new hair color.  In the third render, I've turned the bangs and tail off. Also, because the bangs' rigging allows for it, I am showing them pulled back in the second render: 

 

avmorgan

More haircolor and fit to test renders: 

 

 

avmorgan

Just in case anyone's paying attention, I have a question: I've noticed that Smoothing is ruining my hairline, and the hairline adjustment morphs I've added. When Smoothing is turned on (which helps set the cap firmly on the scalp) it pulls the hairline forward, which just looks odd and artificial. It also "smooths" out about 99% of the Hairline Peak and Cap Fix morphs I created to try and fix that. It seems a waste of effort, and unless I crank up the morphs to 2 to 5 times their full setting, they're pretty much washed out.

Is there something I need to be doing, in the weight mapping or rigidity mapping that protects the morphs from Smoothing effects? Do either even have any influence over Smoothing, or are they limited to joint and autofit influence?

avmorgan

Sigh. My one-click solution was a bust. In spite of the fact that you can create a control property that will toggle the visibility of multiple bones at once -- after ERC Freeze they work as expected -- I couldn't figure out a way to save it. I tried saving them as if they were morphs, or as part of the main Support Asset save, but the ERC links are gone the next time you load the model. For now, you can only create them. If someone knows how to save them, I'd love to hear about it. Here's the properties views for what I tried:

 

avmorgan

Also, I've run into some trouble with my saved morphs blowing up on reload. I didn't think to capture any screenshots, but I've gone back to my source models, reloaded everything a few times, saved the updated morphs, and still have problems once I load the updated model. Does this ever happen to anyone else? If I keep having problems, I'll try to document it better.

...D'oh! It loaded onto my WIP model, without parenting, so there was some kind of "fit to" interference. Sigh.

DDCreate

Looks good! I'm a sucker for ponytail hair styles. Count me in :)

avmorgan

Thanks, DDDCreate! 

I have been able to replicate all my work from the male version on the female version. Up to this point, I've been using OOT Pair Iray Hair Shaders, with custom scalp textures to match, so I'll have to work on my own hair shaders for the final product. I'm also going to see if I can create autofit morphs that will matched the smoothed fit, allowing users to set Collision with clothes of other objects besides the fitted figure. 

Xenomorphine

Still a little longer than I'd like for my purposes (being able to give the illusion of the character using helmets and such), but looks excellent, regardless! I'll definitely get at least the G3F version. Thank you so much for creating a ponytail lower down than most (not that I dislike the higher varieties, it's just that they seemed to be the only option for Genesis 3 until now).

Also found your progress updates very enlightening, too!

zombietaggerung

It looks nice, I like all the movement morphs you're putting in. I'll definitely pick it up when/if you decide to sell it. 

Richard Haseltine

Moved to Art Studio as it isn't a Prioduct Suggestion

avmorgan

I suppose there's a fair distinction between Product Suggestion and Product Proposal; I sort of took the forum to be a bit more of the latter. No problem, though. Thanks, Richard. 

Xenomorphine, I went with the visibility preset option to turn the tail and bangs on and off. I don't think the hair would fit under a helmet even with those turned off, but I think you could fit a hood over the main portion with the tail turned off. That's something I've wanted, the ability to fit a hood over the hair. The rigging allows a lot more control over the scale of the tail. If the length preset doesn't get you where you want, even with limit turned off, then you can adjust the scale of each bone section manually, then save it as a pose preset. 

I don't think the OOT Pair Iray Hair Shaders are sold through the Daz Store, so I don't know if I'll be able to include the custom scalp textures in the Daz product. I'll try to make them available through Renderosity (if I get OOT's permission). Here's a look at all 25 colors: