Hair looks so different when I render...

heisdave

Hi, Im pretty new to Daz.  I bought Zior hair for my figure. In the Studio it looks dark and great, but when I render it looks light and half grey. See image. It this a typical rendering problem or is it realted to the hair asset itelf?  Can I somehow configure the hair to fix it?  Thanks

https://ibb.co/hxMA25

WendyLuvsCatz

are you using iray or 3Delight?

I think its a pre iray hair by looks so you may need to select the surfaces and click the DAZ iray uber preset shader.

Tobor

Most hair uses transmaps and unique texture files, and the techniques these use can give different appearances between Iray and 3DL shaders.

Assuming you're using Iray, this hair is meant for 3Delight. Whether you simply hit Render or apply the Iray Uber preset, the effect is basically the same: an automatic conversion of the hair shader for output to Iray. If you want it to look better, you either need to purchase a third-party Iray hair conversion product (results may vary; the conversion isn't always perfect), or try adjusting things yourself, including revising the transmap and hair texture files that come with the product.

 

heisdave

Thanks the3Digit! I can see that when I selct the hair in  the surfaces window, it shows Shader: omuberSurface on top. When I select the chracter's shirt, it shows Iray Uber, as you mentioend. But I dont see how to change the shader. I went through al the parameters in the panel on the right but I dont see anything correcponding. Do you knwo how to do it ?Thanks

Padone

Also there's a bug in DS since sometime it doesn't convert textures gamma. I don't know why but it's easy to fix it. I take as example the G3F Toulouse Hair but it's the same for other assets.

1) Go to the hair surface tab then click on the Opacity Strenght Texture and select the Image Editor. You will see the image gamma is zero, this gives you "thinner" hair strands than expected.

2) You just have to set gamma to one to get the hair right.

I'm afraid in your case you may have more than one texture to fix. But the procedure is basically the same. Just go to the surface tab and play around with the parameters.

jestmart

It is not a bug in Studio, it is that some image files are saved with the wrong gamma setting.

Padone

I do not believe so. The picture I took as example is SW_Toulouse_TR1.jpg in the G3F Toulouse Hair folder. This is just a regular jpeg file and it does not contain a specific color profile tag. Also this is a transparency map so anyway it is converted into "grayscale data" by the render engine. So it should be accounted by DS as a regular sRGB image with gamma 1.0. But it is not. So it's a bug.

EDIT: Also it is a bug specific to iray since 3delight does use the correct gamma 1.0 value even if you don't specify it in the image editor. While iray needs it to be specified. This is why most hair are "thinner" in iray than in 3delight. Because the alpha map gamma is computed wrong.