Shiny Hair?

dalibuwaitur

How do I make hair shiny?

I bought this:

http://www.daz3d.com/short-ponytail

It looks great in the product images, but dull and matte in my iray renders.  (The scene is lit with several lights from multiple angles.  The skin looks good.  I just want the hair to reflect more light).

I've tried adjusting settings like: glossiness, reflectivity, specular, and refraction, but those either have no effect or make the hair look even duller.  What's going on?

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Also, how do you light only one item, like hair?  I often get the skin to look great, but I want to add more light to the hair or outfit without washing out the skin.  How do I do that?

nonesuch00

I don't own the product but I think it you go into the Surfaces Tab for this hair and do to the Top Coat section does it have a Top Coat specular map? If so, delete it and set the Top Coat Map to strength of 1.0 and the Top Coat Roughness to a strength of somewhre between 0.2 to 0.5 

There are different approaches though so maybe somebody with more experience might have an easier way or a better way or maybe both.  

Richard Haseltine

It's an older item so you would first need to aply the Iray Uber Base to all of its surfaces before being able to adjust top coat etc. A lot of Valea's hairs have quite strong painted on specular highlights, or use a specualr map with painted pseudo highlights so that unlit portions don't show  anything but lit areas are still limited to the painted on highlights. For use in Iray you might want to look at one of the several add-ons offering dedicated hair shaders, such as

http://www.daz3d.com/idg-iray-hair-essentials-shaders

http://www.daz3d.com/uht-hair-shaders-for-iray

Petercat

Richard Haseltine said:

It's an older item so you would first need to aply the Iray Uber Base to all of its surfaces before being able to adjust top coat etc. A lot of Valea's hairs have quite strong painted on specular highlights, or use a specualr map with painted pseudo highlights so that unlit portions don't show  anything but lit areas are still limited to the painted on highlights. For use in Iray you might want to look at one of the several add-ons offering dedicated hair shaders, such as

http://www.daz3d.com/idg-iray-hair-essentials-shaders

http://www.daz3d.com/uht-hair-shaders-for-iray

I have the iray hair essential shaders, and it is great for converting older hair to iray. Plus, it includes a lot of colors, including ones not found in nature. While it doesn't work well with every older hair, it is well worth the purchasing.

It lets you add colors not included with iray hair packages, such as Skyler, Rayne and Aiven.

Petercat

Petercat said:

It's an older item so you would first need to aply the Iray Uber Base to all of its surfaces before being able to adjust top coat etc. A lot of Valea's hairs have quite strong painted on specular highlights, or use a specualr map with painted pseudo highlights so that unlit portions don't show  anything but lit areas are still limited to the painted on highlights. For use in Iray you might want to look at one of the several add-ons offering dedicated hair shaders, such as

http://www.daz3d.com/idg-iray-hair-essentials-shaders

http://www.daz3d.com/uht-hair-shaders-for-iray

 

 

I have the iray hair essential shaders, and it is great for converting older hair to iray. Plus, it includes a lot of colors, including ones not found in nature. While it doesn't work well with every older hair, it is well worth the purchasing.

It lets you add colors not included with iray hair packages, such as Skyler, Rayne and Aiven. Skyler looks cute with red hair, Rayne just looks... dangerous.

Shortstuff81000

I've been working with my own shaders inspired by outoftouch's Fiends Forever (http://www.daz3d.com/fiends-forever-starter-bundle) It is so pretty and shiny in 3Delight. I started my tests by rendering a character in 3Delight using Aiko 6 and Keiko 6 Guassian textures.

 

Fiends hair looks totally bland when simply converted using the Iray uber shader, but I will show you how to come close to the beauty of the 3Delight version.

1. First, take note of the diffuse texture map, specular color and map, reflection map and color, specular2 color, bump map, displacement map, normal map, and any other important values.
2. Once you have done that, apply the Silver metal shader. I know this sounds STRANGE, but just roll with it.  Using the Silver shader gives the hair that shine it looses when converted from 3Delight to Iray, but there are a few more steps involved to making it look awesome. I've never gotten a perfect match to the 3Delight result; it's always been a little too dark to me, but it sure looks pretty!
3. Apply the Texture Map to the Base Color setting.
4. Apply the Specular Map and Specular Color to the Glossy Color setting.
5. Apply the Reflection Map to the Metallic Flakes Color and Weight settings.
6. Apply the Reflection color to the Metallic Flakes color.
7. Apply the Displacement Map and set it at 37.5. I think it is equivalent .75 in 3Delight.
8. Set the Maximum Displacement to .30.
9. Apply the Normal Map and set its value to 1 if it's not there already.
10. Apply the Transparency Map to the Cutout Opacity setting and set its value to 1 if it's not there already.
11. At this point, it is your turn to experiment and find out what works best for you. The original Fiends Forever hair does not have bump applied, but I have applied it in my experiments; I'm not sure if it makes the image look better or not. I tried applying the Bump map to both Base Bump and Top Coat Bump settings both individually and together. I also set their strength to 30.75, which also may be equivalent to .75 in 3Delight.

A comparison of all 4 Fiends Hair Iray Experiments

No bump	Base Bump	Top Coat Bump

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble uploading the image with both base and top coat bump applied.​ Here is a link to the image in my gallery. You can see them all there. ​ https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/161726. I hope this mini tutorial gives everyone woh reads it some ideas.