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3D printing strand based hair???

bringhobringho Posts: 240
in The Commons

Has anyone figured out how to 3D print pure strand based dForce hair?

Comments

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,674

    Sure. Convert the strands to capped tubes, and do a self-intersection merge with a decent boolean tool to stop it confusing your slicer.

    Strand based stuff is actually really good for 3D printing; you can fine tune the strand density and tube thickness until you get a well textured result for your print scale.

  • comixiantcomixiant Posts: 0

    @Matt_Castle
    Out of curiosity, how do you get the strands into, say, Blender to start with?

     

  • benniewoodellbenniewoodell Posts: 1,986

    Matt_Castle said:

    Sure. Convert the strands to capped tubes, and do a self-intersection merge with a decent boolean tool to stop it confusing your slicer.

    Strand based stuff is actually really good for 3D printing; you can fine tune the strand density and tube thickness until you get a well textured result for your print scale.

    I just googled converting strand based hair to capped tubes and couldn't find any information, is this something you do in Daz or Blender? And if you don't mind taking the time, where would I find the buttons to press to do this? I gave up last year trying to do any 3D printing because of the hair issues I encountered, so if there's a way, I would love to make it work. 

  • comixiantcomixiant Posts: 0

    Just found this, not specifically about 'capped tubes' but it does at least show how to get Strand-Based hair into Bender.  You basically just have to ensure that 'Tessellation Sides' is set to at least 3 so that it turns every strand into tube form.  Then export it as an standard object, and finally import it into Blender.

     

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,045

    I've experimented with this using Zbrush.

    My advice is use tessellation 3+ (as indicated above), but also make the hairs 'fat' and less numerous. Basically try to stylize them a bit. Then you can export them as Obj (which will be... f'in huge), and then bring them into some program so you can retopologize them into something more reasonable.

     

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,674

    benniewoodell said:

    I just googled converting strand based hair to capped tubes and couldn't find any information, is this something you do in Daz or Blender?

    Blender.

    Export the hair, split it apart by islands, convert those to curves, convert those curves to tubes.

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,582

    3D print isn't like rendering 

    huge files are not an issue so long as it doesn't have holes 

    the slicing program will fix any topology issues anyway 

    I just simply extruded hairs in Carrara when I used  my now useless DRM locked printer 

    Blender I have also done this for other purposes 

  • ToyenToyen Posts: 1,911

    As others already mentioned. You will need to convert the hair strands into actual geometry in order to 3D print them. I'd be very curious to see how the results look!

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