How to Make Realistic Hair?

[riley1389]

Hello fellow artists!

So here's my predicament; I'm a pretty experienced user of Indigo. The only major thing I don't yet know how to do is create shaders. Also, one more thing: Hair. I've tried everything I could think of and there's always some impassable roadblock. I'm preparing to create a huge project that will not only benefit me, but hopefully make Indigo more known as well. But anyway, I need to be able to render hair to make it happen.

Here are the software packages I use for my modeling:

Sketchup 2014 Pro
Blender 2.7
Zbrush 4r6
MakeHuman
Meshlab

So here is what I've tried and why it doesn't work:

#1. Creating a Particle Mesg in Blender. - - Blendigo doesn't support it.

#2. Converting the Blender Particle Mesh into an actual mesh and applying a "Screw" modifier while setting the angle to .1 degree. -- The mesh polycount ends up being anywhere from 2.5 to 6 million. Also Blendigo doesn't support normal maps for my skin maps. As well as I can't for the life of me figure out how to access the extended material editor.

3. Import the mesh into Sketchup to use it with Skindigo (My preference). -- SketchUp's method of handling polygons is a complete travesty and Trimble/Google should be ashamed of how little it can handle. I've found that it's max usable count on my system (4770k @4.4Ghz) is around the 86,000 mark. So 2.5 to 6 million is like trying to make a pack me lug around a Hummer on its back.

4. Decimation of the mesh in Zbrush to be able to actually import it into Sketchup and then use Indigo's Subdivision (Which I'm 98% sure uses the Catmull-Clark algorithm) -- The "Screw" modifier turned each step in each strand into a single quad, leaving almost no room for decimation without seriously compromising the mesh. I ended up with a bunch of levitating triangles... So, yeah.

5. Use another exporter - - I don't know if any of the exporters support some kind of hair particles. Also, I don't have thousands and of spare dollars to spend on even more software. and Autodesk software is beyond confusing. And I have college bills to pay off.

7. Cry in a corner -- It's gotten rather frustrating... And I was really tired that night... Don't be judging.


Option's I have left:

1. Ask for help

2. Use Zbrush's fibermesh mechanism, and export the displacement map of it.

3. Wait for Blendigo to finally support both particle meshes as well as normal maps.

So any assistance would be greatly appreciated (:

[Polinalkrimizei]

Hi riley, hair is still an issue. Yes, it's 2014, but I guess all the modelers take a different approach so it is hard to implement for the devs?

Go for #2 and see if you are happy with the resulting image. One the screw modifier is applied, tell blender to only show the bounding box of the hair mesh. Then forget about the polycount until the export... There is also a "skip exporting of existing meshes" (something like that) somewhere in blendigo (render panel).
For far away shots/ Depth of field, why not use Blenders decimate modifier?

This workflow still sucks kind of, but will give you the most control over your realistic hair.
For short hair, try particle instances of hair meshes + weight painting. There are tuts here somewhere, only they are made for grass. Particle instances work great with blendigo already.

And post results

[CTZn]

there is a request thread about curve primitives, you could bump it up as I believe most apps generating hairs will possibly be able to export them as curves to Indigo.

[OnoSendai]

A hair primitive is on the TODO list, we will have a look at it after 3.8 is done.

[CTZn]

\o/

[riley1389]

Hooray!

[Eneen]

Any news on hair support?

[aleksandera]

Doesn't luxrender support hair? Maxwell ore Octane maybe? What abaut Mitsuba render? O, and don't forget Cycles has become an amazing render engine About the speed; the hardware manufacturers are working on it. Indigo simply lacks integration

[Eneen]

Don't know about Octane but Lux is slow, Maxwell is extremely slow, Mitsuba hasn't been updated (it's not intended to be commercial alternative). Indigo wins in terms of speed so I hold my thumbs for fast integration and feature addition.

[aleksandera]

Don't know about Octane but Lux is slow, Maxwell is extremely slow, Mitsuba hasn't been updated (it's not intended to be commercial alternative). Indigo wins in terms of speed so I hold my thumbs for fast integration and feature addition.

That was actually meant for the developers

[Eneen]

I know, mine thumb holding too!