Would a hair basemesh purchased elsewhere be easily usable in Daz Studio?

FrauBlucher

I saw this item on artstation https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/a1Grr/25-female-hair-pack-2. How much work it would be to prepare it for use in Daz Studio? Would it be more complicated than just loading it and applying a daz hair shader? I've been looking at this off and on and am just not sure of the time investment involved in using products like these. Thanks in advance for your help!

 

felis

Hair usually have a haircap. That haircap matches the head, so when you use it on a morphed character it will still fit.

In order to use a third party hairmesh, you might be able to scale it to match the character and then parent it to the head.

If you want to use it as a generic hair, you need to use transfer rigging, but then it must fit the character before you do that.

hansolocambo

Haircap is a thing in DAZ. I've never really seen that used much in other 3D areas. It's not mandatory let's say.

Your question is vague and doesn't tell use what's your level... what are your 3D skills. Those base hair meshes are not even advertised as being unwrapped. So what's sold here is really step 1 of polygonal hair creation workflow (hair cards)

To use such hair meshes in DAZ, one would need to know quiet a lot of tools, in at least one of the many all purpose 3D apps such as Blender, 3DS Max, Maya, C4D, etc.

You'd need to :

- Reshape the whole mesh to adapt it to the default G8 skull

- Unwrap all hair threads if necessary and orient hair card's UV islands in the same direction, scaling them to be sure that first and last polygons correspond to root and tip of your hears in the opacity map.

- Define a few Material IDs to get multiple surfaces in DAZ (useful to apply easily different colors and different Surface properties). At least 1 Material ID for the first polygons of each hair thread (close to the skull) if you plan to use the hair with dForce.

- Import the mesh once ready in DAZ and use the Transfer Utility to rig it.

- Import your textures in the Surfaces Tab for each Material ID (= DAZ Surface)

- Add a dForce Dynamic Surface to the hair mesh in order to define dForce parameters for each Surface.

- Add a dForce Modifier Weight Node to specify how much of each Surface parameters influences each polygon.

- etc, etc.

I mean, it is doable for someone who knows quiet a lot in 3D. But it'd take in my opinion about 5 hours or way more depending on the hair complexity. Even for someone with a well-honed technique, making those hair DAZ compatible would represent a lot of work. So much so that I'd say any 3D artist who knows that much... would probably do his own hair threads rather than trusting those already made ones ;)

FrauBlucher

hansolocambo said:

 

I mean, it is doable for someone who knows quiet a lot in 3D. But it'd take in my opinion about 5 hours or way more depending on the hair complexity. Even for someone with a well-honed technique, making those hair DAZ compatible would represent a lot of work. So much so that I'd say any 3D artist who knows that much... would probably do his own hair threads rather than trusting those already made ones ;)

Thank you for saving me from a lot of frustration! I have a little Blender knowledge and have made simple items and done a few clothing and facial morphs on Daz items in Blender. Sadly, I don't think I'm at the level where I would want to take on that type of challenge. I have a few unfinished strand based hair projects I can go back to if I really feel the need to make my own hairstyles. 

FrauBlucher

felis said:

Hair usually have a haircap. That haircap matches the head, so when you use it on a morphed character it will still fit.

In order to use a third party hairmesh, you might be able to scale it to match the character and then parent it to the head.

If you want to use it as a generic hair, you need to use transfer rigging, but then it must fit the character before you do that.

Thank you for your help! Now that I understand a bit more of the process I think it's a bit beyond my current ability.