Genesis to Blender Rigify then onward to Hair in Cycles...
drcharbonneau
Posts: 0
IMO DAZ Studio 4.5 is great for simplifying the process of creating the ideal figure. I've been very successful at d-forming it into anatomical correctness, so in general, it provides the basic character to more than reasonable perfection. It's a shame it doesn't have a more exhaustive set of modeling tools and the particle systems and physics as a compliment. I hear too many reports of Hex crashing, so Blender, I'm finding, isn't that tough to pick up and makes up for DS' shortcomings.
We may find that our own abilities will become the next generation of expertise to pass on. In fact I was near to writing a pdf on some basic vertex modeling, but more on sculpting. Probably not quite ready for that yet, but the point is that once the basics are absorbed, the learning curve begins to level out rapidly. Rigify makes rigging a Genesis obj a very quick process.
At first I had no idea how to activate the cycles rendering engine. That became a "V8" moment. Up in the top menu bar is a little drop down list that, as a default, has "Blender Render" spelled out. Left clicking on that reveals the Cycles Render selection. Clicking on that changes the whole interface where particles and physics are concerned. Just click on particles with even a simple cube or sphere, then click on the "+" sign. The whole list of settings appears. Three selection lists are just below. Name, Settings and Type. Type's default is "emitter." Click on the settings list and then click on "Hair."
Voila! The cube or sphere has hair!
In the 3D window header (I think it should be called a footer) Click in the list box with the cube that reads "Object Mode" then select (LMB) on Particle Mode. The tool panel to the left gives you just about every tool a barber/stylist could ask for. Grab the comb and drag it over the hair strands. Then click on "Smooth" and drag the circle cursor over what was just combed. Maybe cut. You'll get the idea.
The main reason for this thread was for tips on all the above, such as creating a scalp and getting the hair to have materials and render.
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Comments
There is more than one way to put hair on a character in Blender.
One can use a separate scalp mesh, but not render it. There is a setting for this in the particles tab. This makes material assignments much easier, imo.
The other way to put hair on a figure is to create weighted vertex groups and particle system(s) for the entire figure. This way you can add body hair over much larger areas so long as you have the system resources to handle the load. In this case, of course, you need to render the emitter object. To control location and density of hair particles you use the vertex groups assigned to your mesh. Use parent particles to comb, but don't render them. Render only the child particles since they give you multiple options for curls and waves. Once again, these parameters can be controlled by vertex groups. In this method, your material settings could get a bit more complicated, though, since the Genesis mesh gets a dozen or so materials assigned to it in the mcjTeleBlender script (check out the Freepository). You can add materials to an object but not assign them to vertices. The only problem is setting the material index of your particles to the correct number that corresponds to the desired material.
I put Cycles hair on a character in this post, second image:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/11916/P15/#253767
I can post a screen shot of my settings for this image if you like...
Thank you for posting this. I was wondering how well Blenders system worked for hair and haven't had the time to test it out yet. Your results are very nice :)
Hi Dave.
I've been reviewing a tut on the method you described. I am questing after that first method, which all I really lack is the method for creating the scalp mesh. Perhaps you could throw a little light on that?
I took a UV sphere, added the hair and messed with it, but that attempt didn't render. I reviewed the BGuru tut on hair in cycles and saw it was a setting, changed it when adding hair to a cube, thus it worked. That was yesterday. Today that setting is eluding me again :(
I remember that in the render context panel, Feature Set is supposed to be set to "experimental."
I imagine I'll have to go back to the BG tut...
Thank you, Gedd. I have not attempted to use strand rendering since that particular image because my old laptop was so slow at it. With my new laptop I should be able to explore possibilities much more quickly, and my initial attempts have been promising. Intel i7 rules! ;)
Dr. C, I think the easiest method would be selecting vertices on the head that more or less line up with the borders of a hairline. It might be useful to import a regular hair mesh object from DAZ Studio to use as a template. With the selected vertices you then press Shift-d to duplicate them and press 'p' to create a new object by selection. Be careful not to separate the existing scalp from the head. With the new mesh you can then delete unwanted materials that get transferred in the process of creating a new object. Give it a couple levels of subdivision to round out the edges. You can use the DS hair mesh you import as a guide to get some idea of where to comb the strands. Finally, I would recommend having at least 6-8 GB RAM before attempting this.
Hi Dave.
That sounds like a "V8" moment :P (By that, I'm referring to the temple slap in the commercial, but basically "Why didn't I think of that) Referring to the duplicate part of it all. Then (in edit mode I assume) the P and click on "selection?"
I have 2Gb in that machine and 4Gb in this one. This fall or December I'll be building a new machine with at least 8Gb (hope to afford 16...) and likely a decent graphics card. For now I'd think I might be okay if I don't order up half a million particles?
Thanx for the tip.
I went back to simply a cube with hair particles. Still no rendering of the hair. It would save me a bit of time if you could perhaps point out the settings, keeping in mind I'm still in Cycles Render. Having the viewport set to Rendered does slow the machine a bit, but I expect that.
I'll post screenshots tomorrow...
Cool!
I did get it to render with the Blender Render. I'll likely go over the BG tut again this evening.
Here's the screenshot. Keep in mind that this was done with 2.66a. The 2.67RC has a few additional parameters in the Cycles hair settings. I've also noticed that viewport rendering in 2.67RC now supports strands. It was kind of weird going back to 2.66a and wondering what happened to my hair! The settings you see are good for a system with limited resources. Note, however, that memory usage is still over 2 GB (according to Blender), and you might want to have your Window Task Manager open just to monitor the situation. Once Blender goes into swap space, everything comes to a halt until you either close Blender or somehow let it finish adding up all the geometry. Use 'fast planes' to conserve resources. Frankly, it's good enough for most uses.
You might notice that I used one of the 'caps' that come with hair products for Genesis, in this case Val PH Sassy. I weight painted vertices where I wanted hair to go and set that up in the vertex groups under 'Density.'
This was captured on my old laptop, btw, since I'm still getting things set up on the new one. That's why the render time is so long. I've estimated the speed increase on the new laptop to be 5 times faster when running CPU only, and 4.5 times faster with GPU compute, when using supported features in Blender. (AMD A6 4400m-2.7GHz vs. Intel i7 3830QM-2.4GHz vs. NVidia GT630M)
Thanx for the screenshot, Dave.
I worked through the BG tut last night with good success. That'll come in handy though for ANYONE who needs a quick reference. I started using the nodes to mix my materials. Sweet!
2.67RC? All I saw on the Blender DL page was 2.66a. Where am I missing this new one?
As of now, running lean will be fine. I'm learning more than anything and slow renders are old hat for me. (I first started rendering with POV on a 386 SX/w the math coprocessor, then on to a 486DX running Acad's AME and Accurender...) Lots to do besides sit at the computer. Other machines call to me periodically... :-)
It's actually best, IMO, to learn both render engines.
BTW... the scalp making tip worked great!
Thanx again.
It seems we might try using your scalp method for producing clothes too, would think.
I really like the way the nodes viewport works in cycles. It's a taxonomical flow chart.
I take it one can open a separate viewport on each object/material?
Blender's interface updates automatically across all windows and screens. Yes, you can create multiple windows and place them on however many monitors you have. Let's say you have a monitor with a Blender window open on it, and you are viewing material nodes in it. In another Blender window on another monitor you have your scene being viewport rendered in Cycles, the Outliner and Properties editor. If you select different objects in the Outliner or different materials in the Properties editor, your node setup on the other monitor will change to display the corresponding material nodes. I know of no way to get multiple material nodes for different objects viewable in the same instance of Blender at the same time.
I was referring to one node per material, many materials.
Many materials? Potential many windows? More screen real estate. Potentially more monitors all having more real estate, thus more video cards. Thus more capability. That's like a Fall or December machine...
I'm still exploring Blender. Mostly on the low RAM machine. That forces me to simplify.
I'll be messing with DS again soon.
Well this is new. At least to me it is...
I have been happily creating Genesis figures in DAZ and importing them in Blender and editing, sculpting and adding materials. Created the scalp as Dave said. All was fine till I added hair. All the strands grew from the inside surface of the scalp down.
What might I have done to cause this? How can I cure it?
In edit mode select all and flip the normals on the cap.
Hmmmm...
Okay. I'll check that out.
Thanks.
Edit:
That did it.
I've noticed, too, that scale of the object (scalp this time) is important. I added hair to an underscaled figure and it ended up 10 times the length of the figure.
I know the Physics functions assume for math calculations that 1 Blender Unit = 1 cubic meter, perhaps the Particles function do too.
I've been most successful, scale-wise, exporting Genesis at 10%, where, if one picks the Blender setting, it only sets it for 2%.
What settings are recommended by the more experienced users? I've been leaving the mesh res at 1. I think I remember one person suggesting it be set at base. Other than that, referring to the export dialog box, what settings are best?
I downloaded and installed 2.67.
It sounded as though there were some things one needs to know about this release. I suppose my biggest question is "What's different from the commands perspective?"
Basic functionality doesn't change from one release to the next. There are only refinements and additions. Check out the release notes to see what has been added since 2.66. One change that did slightly affect my workflow was a refinement to the way node groups are displayed and edited in Cycles material nodes. The basic command structure didn't change, though. Of course, this release now supports SSS shader in Cycles, but that doesn't affect workflow. Freestyle line drawing is a now a permanent feature in 2.67, but I've not really warmed up to it yet. Pynodes have made it possible to create node materials for external renderers like Luxrender. I watched a demo video about it, but haven't found a use for it yet in my tests. Other than that, it's pretty much the same as 2.66 with bug fixes (and probably new bugs, too). ;)
I always set my scene to 'meters' instead of 'blender units.' On objects that you import, if you need to scale them, it is preferable to do so in edit mode relative to the origin, but you can do it in object mode too. In that case it may also be necessary to correct scaling and rotation on objects. Ideally, they should all have rotations of 0 degrees and scaling of 1.0 in all 3 axes. Use Ctrl-a to 'apply' the scale, location (optional), and/or rotation, as necessary.
As for hair, it will always start out 'long.' You adjust length in the particles tab to suit your needs.
It appears that hairs penetrates anything in its path. Is it possible to duplicate the scalp twice, possibly extrude the second 0.01, then apply the original figure's skin tone to the outer? The reason I ask is the scalp seems to retain the material assigned to the hair. Maybe you know a less complicated tip to solve that.