Arctic fox: furred!

I cheated on this because I used a red fox model (arctic foxes look a little bit different, more compact and less skinny, slightly different head shape.
The process of creating fur was straightforward and, believe it or not, I didn't need to comb hair at all.
The whole fur has been accomplished using the taper, spherize and length deformers, and the randomize roots and randomize length on full hair.
Used the scale tool a little bit just to balance some fur spots, and rendered in 22 minutes using the advanced shader provided with LAMH.
Added a subtle HDR toning to enhance contrast a bit.
Hope you like it...

The arctic fox: furred!

The un-furred version

Density maps: quick overview

"Quick and dirty" example showing how you can assign a density map to a surface, and how that will affect hair population.
As explained in the movie, hair density will be calculated gathering grey scale values, where white pixels is full density, black pixels account for no hair, and grey values will be used to calculate interpolated densities.

Deformers and selection controls

In this movie I'm giving a quick overview of the available deformers and how those can be combined to quickly shape hair. I'm also showing how to use selection controls to mask some areas so that deformers and styling will only apply to those.
Notice how some of the deformers can be applied to one or more axis simultaneously (see that small xyz mini widget along the deformer slider), and how you can combine deformers to produce different results.

As a side note, as explained earlier in this blog, preview hair may have some sharp corners but those will be "smoothed" during the render, producing nice spline curves.


Please watch the movie HD and full screen to appreciate all the details.

New feature: the Scene Explorer

I worked very hard during last two weeks and so now it's time to start showing some of the new features.

The first one is the Scene Explorer, which allows to easily add a figure or a prop available in the Studio scene directly to the Look at my Hair framework.

With figures, it's even possible to choose specific nodes to load.

As usual, here is a brief movie to demonstrate the new feature:

African woman hair

Continuing experiments with crispy hair: here is anAfrican female test render, and two versions with some HDR filters applied.
Click to see full size.

Afro look on the way...

In this example, I didn't even have to comb hair: I used the spherize and the curl deformers to get a very basic shape, and scaled hairs on front a little bit.
Yet not a real afro hair with extremely crispy hairs, but that will come in time...

Meerkat: larger render

Hi think this looks better, it's a render with higher quality. I added the background manually in postwork.
Click it to see full size.

Meerkat: furred!

Another figure nicely furred! A meerkat, little cute african animal.

Symmetric editing

Since somebody asked if it is possible to edit hair symmetrically, here comes a video that demonstrates it.

Spherize and Taper effects

I don't recall ever demonstrating these two effects: they are very important to quickly shape guide hairs.
The spherize effect nicely round all the hairs down, a bit like gravity.
The taper effect will evenly taper hairs down along the vertical axes.
Well,  I'm sure the video will clearly show those effects better than my words...

Quick setup for follicle areas

Besides using the follicle brush to add or remove follicles, or the marquee tool on larger areas, another cool feature is the possibility to add or remove the follicles belonging to a specific surface. So for example you'll be able to discard hidden or unwanted parts like eyes, nails, mouth and else.

Windows porting: OK

One of my biggest concerns was the amount of time needed to port Look at my Hair to Windows (I work on Mac). While Qt libraries should (and do) guarantee portability, I was worried about the openGL code and multi-thread support routines.
Instead, I was able to complete the port in one afternoon only: good news, this will speed times for good.
Nothing exciting, but here is a screenshot to "prove" that LAMH Windows version is "alive"!

Multi-threading support enabled!

I finally added support for multi-threading, which allows to use all the processor cores available and allow concurrent operations, with a huge benefit in terms of speed.
Incredible how moving a large amount of hairs is now so fast!
I will apply multi-threading to all those routines that require lot of calculations, and this will be a HUGE asset to be used in the future with dynamics and physics applied to hairs.

Panda: furred!

Lately I'm stressing Look at my Hair searching for bugs, flaws and testing how it works. 

This project was quite demanding as it contains about 350k hairs, but there were no issues to report.

Attached the render and the interface screenshots showing fur setup.

Badger: furred!

Finished playing with a european badger (Meles meles) I started some time ago (about 1 year IIRC).

Posed it very quickly, furred the whole body, and here are the renders (added an HDR toning in Photoshop in the second image).
Last image, the figure without fur: the poor animal looks very sad there, am I right?

Fur coats

Some more test renders with a fur coat and Victoria4.
No styling at all, just enabled all the coat follicles, grown the hair, rendered.

In the leopard-scheme fur coat, I wasn't very precise painting the texture (see the areas highlighted in red in the no-fur image, which show the issues that break the tile pattern), but you get the idea: colors are transferred from the object texture to the curves automatically (that's optional of course).

First grass experiments

Look at my Hair can be used to model and produce even grass and similar.

Here is a quick test I did, two renders with a little bit of glow added in Photoshop.

Considerations
It could look better, because right now, as I wrote some time ago, curves are rendered so that they are always facing the camera. This is particularly good when you do hair, because even being flat ribbons, that way you will always have the illusion that they have a "tubular" section, like they are in real world.
However this is not the best approach for grass and grass-like primitives, which actually are flat ribbons and they should not face always the camera.
I'll decouple that parameter and make it optional, so that users will be given the choice wether to have curves facing or not facing the camera.

Also, there is no possibility yet to add a random variation to root and tip widths; with that, strands would look less uniform and more realistic, especially with grass.

Fur everything you like!

I just finished adding the possibility to import and "fur" any kind of object (and not only Poser/DAZ figures).
This opens for an infinite range of possibilities: I just finished furring a simple sphere with 70k tiny hairs (simple render attached). Tomorrow I'll fur some more objects and post the results.

China girl

Building up on the model from the previous "spherize deformer" session, I decided to render the image and here it comes.

Spherize deformer in action

This movie demonstrates how the "spherize" deformer can easily drape hair on the figure and create a nice hair model to be styled further.
Notice also how the deformer can be applied only on unmasked areas and how the spherize deformer works in both vertical directions.

Giraffe: furred!

Another test render on the Giraffe: really few hair on this (about 140000), considering the large follicle area.
Rendered with mid-settings, about 12 minutes.

Giraffe with fur

Original figure

Fur and Hair RenderMan shaders

I was finally able to embed RenderMan shaders specifically designed for hair and fur.

It's a wonderful add on that allows to use such shaders directly in DAZ Studio, and the quality of the output is way much better than the usual ambient occlusion shaders that often are used with hair.

I ran some quick renders (low quality settings, shading rate=0.75), only 20000 hair very thick (35x than average human hair), one distant light, with colors ranging from blonde to black and low specular intensity.

I'm now going to code the GUI interface so that it will be easier to play with those some more...

Snow leopard: furred!

Another test ran on the Snow Leopard original figure I designed about two years ago.
I used lowest render settings (easy to tell by the poor quality visible especially on hair tips).
As usual you get the standard and furred render to compare the difference.

Furred version

Standard figure

Hair integrity during transformations

This short movie shows how hair integrity (i.e. position, density and orientation) is maintained during node transformations, even in delicate spots such as bulges and cavities.
In this case, I have a Genesis leg covered with fur (and note that no styling at all was done on those hair, they are just as they come out of the 'equalized guide hair' deformer), and I demonstrate how hair positions are properly calculated when the Genesis knee is bent backward and to its original position.

Shader Mixer on RenderMan curves: done!

No renders today but an important new anyway. After struggling for quite some time, trying to have the Shader Mixer modifying RenderMan curve surfaces, today I finally succeeded!

So from now on it's possible to use the Shader Mixer to freely load, save, create, edit any kind of shader and use those directly on RenderMan curves.