strand based hair woes

lamoid_5f20d3e469

I managed to create strand based hair -- body hair -- for a G8F character. It is leg hair stubble. Looks fine as long as I do not save the scene and then later reload it. Upon reloading it the hair has changed in some appearance-critical ways. In particular the widths on the distribute tab have returned to their default values and all the parameters on the tweaks tab have reverted to their defaults. Any time I reload the scene I have to select the hair open it in the editor and re-apply the parameters I want. What am I doing wrong? Why is this happening?

Also I am unable to export the hair so I can apply it to other G8F figures. Exporting it as a wearble does not work correctly nor does converting it from an object to a figure with triax weighting and bones inherited  from the parent figure work. I have tried it both with the figure as is and with the figure zeroed both at the current resolution and the base resolution. When merged back into a scene -- even the scene in which it was created -- not only are the parameters reset as explained above but also the hair is loaded some distance away from the figure. I does not matter if I use the fit-to parameter or not.

Am I doing something wrong or is strand-based hair so very buggy as to be unusable?

Please let me know your experiences with this.

Thanks!

lilweep

All my Paint, Distribution, Style, Tweak settings are all brought over fine.  So no idea why this is buggy for you...

I have just been saving them as figure/prop assets (or scenes).  On load, i edit 'Fit To' in parameters. 

Transformations should not apply if you have Apply Transformations OFF in parameters.  Toggle this if it does not 'fit to'.

im not sure, but possible that transformations of Groups could impact fit.

lamoid_5f20d3e469

Thank you, Lilweep. I greatly appreciate the help you have given me on this and other problems.

Unfortunately toggling fit to parameters has no effect. The strand based hair does not move from its loaded position whether or not I load it with the figure selected or parent it to the figure after loading it, wherther I've saved it as a wearble, a scene subset, or a figure/wearble asset. Apply transforms does nothing. Nor does it matter if it is in a group or not. Frustrating because the hair looks great rendered on the figure immediately after creating it. (or after reloading the scene a readjusting the SBH's parameters to what they were before saving it.)

Those of you who have read this: Have you had the same problem?

nonesuch00

lamoid_5f20d3e469 said:

Thank you, Lilweep. I greatly appreciate the help you have given me on this and other problems.

Unfortunately toggling fit to parameters has no effect. The strand based hair does not move from its loaded position whether or not I load it with the figure selected or parent it to the figure after loading it, wherther I've saved it as a wearble, a scene subset, or a figure/wearble asset. Apply transforms does nothing. Nor does it matter if it is in a group or not. Frustrating because the hair looks great rendered on the figure immediately after creating it. (or after reloading the scene a readjusting the SBH's parameters to what they were before saving it.)

Those of you who have read this: Have you had the same problem?

There is 'fit to' and 'apply transform' on / off toggles and I find sometimes you need to toggle both of them (the small grey buttons on the SBH).

Also, I think you can't make a SBH for G8F and have it work on G8M or vice versa.

lamoid_5f20d3e469

Thank you for your observations, nonesuch00. On your recommendation I tried the four possible combinations of those two switches and none had any effect in this situation.

I have found a work-around that may offer a clue to what is going on (apart from my cluelessness). The root positions of the figure and the hair are different. If I compenstate for them the hair realigns. For example, if the figure's root position is x=0.0, y=25.7, z=-3.4 and I set the hair's root position to x=0.0, y=-25.7, and z = 3.4, then the hair is aligned with the figure. That is, I set the hair's position to the negative of the figures position. Also important: the hair must not be parented to the figure when doing this. Then it can be reparented and everything works as it should.  I suspect that I am doing something wrong when saving the SB hair as a wearable or as a scene figure asset.  I know that the root positions of both the figure and the hair (or any other figure asset) have effects on the results but I do not know how to set up for those when saving the asset.  

Do you know how that should be done?

Thanks.

lilweep

 

lamoid_5f20d3e469 said:

Also important: the hair must not be parented to the figure when doing this. Then it can be reparented and everything works as it should. 

What do you mean by 'reparented'?  SBH should not be parented.

Maybe the problem is you are parenting the hair therefore you are needing to counteract the parent's transformation values.

lamoid_5f20d3e469

That makes sense, lilweep. I'll see if that is the problem and report back.Thank you!!!

lamoid_5f20d3e469

Two years later and I'm still having problems with SBH:

In the attached image you can immediately see the problem. The SBH is detached from the skin surface. Apparently it does not follow morphs applied to the underlying figure's mesh. Do you know how to solve this problem? I've tried creating the hair both before and after morphing the surface and the results are the same. I've tried creating the hair with the figure in the zero position and after posing. No difference. Scaling does not work because it scales with respect to the orgin of the hair. For example if I do an x-scale change, the positions of the hairs do change in the x-drection. However, the hairs furthest from the origin are pulled in toward the surface while the hairs closest to the x-origin are pulled away from the surface even more. It appears like the usual ways of morphing surfaces do not work on strand-based hair. Any ideas?

Thank you!