What is used to make the hairstyle graphics in MH

[Shaba1]

I found a tutorial on how to make hair that can be imported into Makehuman ( I will post the url later) But the authour says to use the default long hair graphic. Well the title of the new hair comes out right but the graphic is always long hair. I would like to make my own preview of the two hairstyles that I have made and have them display in the libraries panel. What program is used to make the preview graphics?

[workinprogress]

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Making a Hairstyle Preview image, my method:
(not including the really bad cartoon heads I draw for My own use)

Look in your MakeHuman hair folder,
Find an existing preview image, like the Long.png you mentioned and copy it using control+c or whatever is appropriate for your operating system. Paste the copy into Your working folder for the hairstyle you want to preview, and rename it to something easily recognizable, like "Preview-template.png", Open this in your favorite image editor, Clear it (select all and delete everything within the image)and save. Now you can use this blank image as a template for Your preview images.

Using MakeHuman, and your rendering engine of choice, render a semi-profile view of a Model with your hairstyle applied, set the render background to be transparent if you can, and save the render. Open the rendered image in your favorite image editor, Select Just the head and complete hairstyle( including the neck) and copy it.

Now, open your Preview-template.png and and create a new transparent layer. Paste the Head-shot copy of the rendered model onto it, re-size the pasted image layer and adjust as required, merge all layers, and save it with the same file name as your hairstyle, but of course keeping the .png file extension.

Copy your new preview image and paste it into the hair folder with the other files for your hairstyle.

Note: I know you probably didn't need the really basic information,
but I thought it might be helpful for others, so I included it. Hope this answers your question and will be some help to you

[jcapco]

backgrounds are png. You can use a renderer to create the background. You can render the hair in makehuman, and then you can save the output in folder were the hairs are saved.. just make sure that the size is around 256x256 pixels (you can use any image software to view this information). Its nice to have the image with transparent background. You can define transparent backgrounds in Gimp too, in fact probably you should use it anyway because the renders in makehuman comes out as .tif and you want that as .png (and gimp does a good conversion of that). Render outputs from makehuman is seen in your documents folder under ./makehuman/renderman_output/ribFiles (find the latest .tif file generated that should be the last render you made with makehuman).

Don't forget to group the hairs (this is a lot of fine work.. grouping hairs is not so simple) when rendering so that the hairs in between guide hairs will be interpolated and the head wont look bald when rendered (tutorial of this is in the same site where you found the tutorial for makehuman hairs). Then you have to go to render settings usually here I would set Randomness to maximum, Clump children interpolation you want it around 2-3 (clump means what they mean, how many hairstrands should clumped together), and Multistrand interpolation you want it to be between 50 and 100 depending on your number of groups. You should be able to calculate it.. a rough estimate of human hair strands is around 10,000 and this number comes from :

Multistrand children X Clump children X no. of Groups you created in your hair

This should be roughly 10,000. You want your clump though to be at minimal something around 3 (unless you really want your hair to be clumpy).

Have fun!

[Shaba1]

backgrounds are png. You can use a renderer to create the background. You can render the hair in makehuman, and then you can save the output in folder were the hairs are saved.. just make sure that the size is around 256x256 pixels (you can use any image software to view this information). Its nice to have the image with transparent background. You can define transparent backgrounds in Gimp too, in fact probably you should use it anyway because the renders in makehuman comes out as .tif and you want that as .png (and gimp does a good conversion of that). Render outputs from makehuman is seen in your documents folder under ./makehuman/renderman_output/ribFiles (find the latest .tif file generated that should be the last render you made with makehuman).

Don't forget to group the hairs (this is a lot of fine work.. grouping hairs is not so simple) when rendering so that the hairs in between guide hairs will be interpolated and the head wont look bald when rendered (tutorial of this is in the same site where you found the tutorial for makehuman hairs). Then you have to go to render settings usually here I would set Randomness to maximum, Clump children interpolation you want it around 2-3 (clump means what they mean, how many hairstrands should clumped together), and Multistrand interpolation you want it to be between 50 and 100 depending on your number of groups. You should be able to calculate it.. a rough estimate of human hair strands is around 10,000 and this number comes from :

Multistrand children X Clump children X no. of Groups you created in your hair

This should be roughly 10,000. You want your clump though to be at minimal something around 3 (unless you really want your hair to be clumpy).

Have fun!

Thanks jcacpo.

My main purpose in using make human is to make characters for export to unity 3d thru blender and for the blender game engine. So I have to turn the hair into meshes. I know how to do that. But then I have to decimate them a lot in order not to exceed the polygon limit in Unity and to get an acceptable frame rate in the BGE. Any reccomendations on keeping the face count low but at the same time getting the hair to look realistic. And while I am on the topic how to uv map hair so that it can be exported.

[jcapco]

Thanks jcacpo.

My main purpose in using make human is to make characters for export to unity 3d thru blender and for the blender game engine. So I have to turn the hair into meshes. I know how to do that. But then I have to decimate them a lot in order not to exceed the polygon limit in Unity and to get an acceptable frame rate in the BGE. Any reccomendations on keeping the face count low but at the same time getting the hair to look realistic. And while I am on the topic how to uv map hair so that it can be exported.

ugh.. decimating and then redoing a uv map can be challenging. Why dont you try to reduce the hair strands from the .obj file (in the /data/hairs folder). And then import the hair in makehuman and then convert to mesh. That way you have fewer polygons and I believe that the uv-coordinates are also saved in your obj file (makehuman does the uv coordinate for you). Decimating will definitely not be a very nice idea, how do you decimate it? Do you use Blender? Have you tried meshlab to decimate. I think meshlab has more decimating algorithms (than blender) and parameters to play with, for instance you can try to decimate by "keeping the topology", it won't be pretty but it could be better than Blender's algorithm.