Suggestion "Solid" hair

[3Dartist]

Hi,
It might be a good idea to provide "solid" hair as well, as a mesh, not only particles.
Tell me what you think.

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Great work, keep it up!

[Sergio]

Hi 3Dartist,

The hairs can be yet exported as mesh (separate Wavefront object). So it's possible to import its under Blender, of course, but also under other modellers, e.g. Ayam3D (less known but very interessant for a work with NURBS curven).


Cheers,

Sergio

[3Dartist]

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.
That's not exactly what I meant. Indeed you can export those to .obj, but do that and put it back on the head of a human model in Max or Blender, and you'll see the character has very few hair. I think of the current hair as guidelines for a hair material (like in Max for instance). What I mean is real hair object as you could see for instance in this model: http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/ma ... /hair3.php

[jcapco]

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.
That's not exactly what I meant. Indeed you can export those to .obj, but do that and put it back on the head of a human model in Max or Blender, and you'll see the character has very few hair. I think of the current hair as guidelines for a hair material (like in Max for instance). What I mean is real hair object as you could see for instance in this model: http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/ma ... /hair3.php

There are many ways hair can be made and rendered. We use renderman engines to render our hairs, but for that you do not need expensive high poly models, all you need are the guides and then the children will be generated from the guides while rendering thru aqsis or any renderman engine (and that's what we do in makehuman). Another way you can have your hairs cheaply generated and rendering is done by a uv-map on the hair exported as mesh. Thus, we made the export as mesh with variable mesh width possible (hair width can be adjusted in the Hair det. Tab in Modelling Menu).

If a wider mesh export will satisfy you, then the discussion is over. But if you want all the children that are rendered (as seen in renderman engine renders) be also exported, then I am curious to know why you want the children. Doesn't the final rendered results suffice? Wouldn't working with the children be too expensive for you? An average human hair has 100,000 strands and this is really the minimum (if you cheat this correctly you can reduce this to a tenth but still this is a lot). And working with 100,000 meshes alone is quite a pain (I was actually lenient and didnt counted the subdivision each hair strand will have. We do bezier interpolation to make the subdivisions and those are A LOT).

But anyway, having this export (for the guides AND the children) available for the user is not a difficult job and we can surely integrate this in the application. But I do fear that if this is done without any major justification, then users will not work efficiently to make their hair and as a result they will not be pleased by their work and maybe then even dislike makehuman for creating a hair export that requires a lot of machine power (not all users are smart enough to know that you can have other form of hair exports). But still I would like to learn about the reasons why you want the children to be exported if this is what you want.

EDIT: I just saw the site your referred us on hair. That is certainly possible by adjusting the width of the guide-hairs. I can also add an alogorithm that will cause the pointy ends when exporting (I think actually we do this, its been a long time that I exported the hairs as mesh).

[3Dartist]

Thanks for the reply.
Of course I did not mean exporting every single hair as a mesh.
I meant as you can see in the site I linked. You can see it is not really too high poly, is it?
As a game developer I got take the number of polys into account.
My main reason is that it is easier for reql time applications.
Ill comment a bit more later, when I find an azerty keyboqrd here, sorry for the spelling