Why is all of my black hair Rendering in White?!! SOLVED!
Why is it that when I buy Black hair, it always renders white?! In every scene and in all kinds of lighting. I'm sure it's User Error but still! Do I have to spend an hours screwing with lights and textures to make black hair black?! It used to render black but now its like every dark hair girl I pose is 70. If anyone could help me out, I would appreciate it. But if you do respond. Please do it in plain English, not Daz talk i.e. "Well what you need to do is bump up your like specularity and cross gen with a bit map in order to achieve your desired luminosity so as to exencuate the background shade editor!"
That sounded a bit hostile but some people like to FLEX when they respond. I know you're smart, I know I'm dumb. So talk to me like I'm dumb.
Please help!
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Comments
First a simple question...which renderer are you using?
IRay. That's why I did an image capture.Doesn't look like 3Delight to me and I'm new.
Usually the 3Delight materials will autoconvert to Iray, but sometimes they don't do the best. The easiest way to make sure things like hair render properly is to make sure the renderer specific materials are applied.
Now with hair, only the newer ones have Iray materials, so that isn't an option. Another is to apply the Iray Uber and tweak the settings (not an easy thing to get right). Aprilysh supplied this mini-tutorial on how to fix some of them without Iray specific materials
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/989828/#Comment_989828
A third option is... http://www.daz3d.com/uht-hair-shaders-for-iray ; It is a nearly universal hair shader that will do Iray specific materials for a wide range of hair...especially those that don't come with their own.
The hair being grey is actually more common than you might think when converting materials from 3Delight to Iray. Basically, the two engines work in very different ways. Iray uses real-world light physics to figure it out, while 3Delight takes shortcuts and 'cheats' to speed things up. This 'cheating' is called biased rendering, because it has a bias towards one thing or another.
In the case of your hair, this is often caused because it's reflecting too much light. In the real world, what we see is the light reflected off a surface. Whether that surface is a table, a chair or someone's hair, how much light it reflects will change how bright it appears. Surfaces which don't reflect much light will seem darker, and black is one of the darker surfaces. Glossy hair happens when it doesn't reflect much light overall, but when the light hits at a certain angle, it bounces right off (an over-simplification, but you get the idea). This angular reflection gives it the sheen you sometimes see on very shiny hair.
Anyway, back to the problem. Since your hair is reflecting too much light, it's likely that the specular colour needs reducing to a darker shade. Specular tells Daz Studio how much light the surface is going to reflect, and the image maps in the specular channel tell it how much of that sheen goes to which parts of the hair. If you bring the specular colour to a grey which is closer to zero (but not fully zero), it should make the hair much darker.
You can find the specular channel in the surfaces tab by selecting the object and choosing the right surface. Some hair will have multiple surfaces, so you can use the surface selection tool to make sure you've picked the right one. Hope this helps.
Thank you all for your feedback. I will try what you suggested Herald. I'm sorry if I came off sounding rude. I was just really frustrated. I keep having the expectation that when I buy something from Daz, it will look like it does in the picture. I guess I just have to get used to doing some after purchase tweaking. But again, I really appreciate the information and tips.
Aaaaand it worked like a charm! Thanks Herald!!
Oh, it did, the hair rendered very nicely... when it was released, which means all the hair materials were made for 3Delight because Iray wasn't yet a rendering option. I'm afraid it's just one more new thing to keep in mind when buying something — if it was made before Iray rendering was added to DAZ|Studio, then you can't just load and render; you're going to have to pause and think about whether the materials will need tweaking after you convert them to Iray.
Good tip. I didn't know that till now. And I don't mind doing a little tweaking here and there. As long as I know how to fix the issues its no biggie. Thanks again to everyone for the info!
You're welcome and, no you didn't come off as sounding rude. On the contrary, it's good to know where someone's skill level is so I can get the point across more eloquently. No point giving someone psychobabble that they can't translate, after all. I'm glad it worked out for you.