Fixing pokethrough on dForce strand-based hair
AndrewJJP
Posts: 711
When transmapped hair moves through other things, and bones / other adjustments don't help, I can fix it with Mesh Grabber if it’s minor or a morph if its more significant.
An example of this might be a hand pushing into the hair. The hair should not go through the hand. But it also happens in other more common scenarios.
I’ve only just started to use 4.22 and the “new” hair (new to me) and while I feel it's far more realistic in renders, the simulation is not perfect. I didn't think it would be, but I thought I would be able to fix it. But the methods for transmapped hair don't appear to work. So sow do I move the hair if I am not satisfied with the simulation? I'm finding a lot of hair has no adjustment at all and trying over and over with tweaked animations is not getting me anywhere.
Are there tools that can just grab the offending hair and move it? Mesh Grabber cannot seem to see it and I have not had any luck importing it to Blender to make morphs. Dose the new rental Mesh Grabber do this? There's no trial, so I can't test it for myself.
Thanks.
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Comments
you didnt post a screenshot of your problem but I guess I will use my imagination.
i think the issue will orginate from fact that not all hairs on the SBH will respond to simulation. It would be impossible to simulate thousnds of individual strands in a simulation and have it not take hours. Some of the hairs are just interpolated hair, so they will follow the fewer simulated hairs, but because they are not active themselves in simulation, they might not be perfect.
The new mesh grabber (which may or may not be released yet) claims to be able to morph SBH, whether it would let you achieve what you want, of that im not sure.
Thank you very much! Sorry, a didn't have a picture at the time I posted.
I believe that the only way to (maybe) get the new mesh grabber is to get Premium. It’s a shame there is no trial so no way to see without losing my Daz+. I’d love to give it a try.
Thank you for your answer anyway. ;)
You could also export to Blender and fix it there, then bring back to Daz.
I dont think the blender sculpting brushes work on curves, but i assume you can convert curves to hair curves or particles and use the associated brushes for those.
In DS versions before 4.23, there is no tool (incl. Mesh Grabber) can deform an SBH except for D-Former. If you send SBH with polylines to Blender, you cannot deform it. If you export SBH with tessellation generated to Blender, you can deform it as they're already mesh... but you have no way to bring it back to DS as a morph.
Now, Mesh Grabber 4.0 aka Geometry Sculptor in DS 4.23 can truely deform SBH ... however unfortunately it has bugs when deforming an SBH and they cause DS crash... Personally suggest you a no-go for that tier... at least for the time being.
If you do need to deform an SBH in 4.22, use D-Former... however, whether that'll be cumbersome or not depends on the case you have and how you want the shape deformed...
I've found dFormers difficult. I've always found the Blender brushes, and in some cases edit mode easier and more flexible, but maybe I could give them another try, it's been a long time...
It strikes me from what you've said that it might be to export to Blender possible to export to Blender with geomerty for the hair, then edit there, then import it back as an OBJ and copy across the materials. I don't do animations, so that would be a workaround for now. I've used the same workaround for the lack of HD morph support when I can be bothered...
Maybe they will fix MeshGrabber at some point. Hopefully keeping an eye on the release notes might tell me...
Thanks both very much!
Yes, Daz SBH can be imported to Blender and adjusted there, then brought back into DAz Studio. You can export as obj and then in Blender convert to Blender's Hair Curves by right clicking: Convert to... Curves. Then you should be able to use the Hair Curves tools to manipulate the hair. To export, you will need to do another conversion back to an exportable format.
You can use omnihair shader etc on imported hair, but copying over the materials presets from another hair won't always work because:
A) Daz dForce SBH has the option use the Scalp UV to map the hair color, which many vendor's utilise, and which you as a non-vendor cant do after importing hair into Daz from Blender. You can still color strands individually with a noise color map or some other texture map, but it wont follow the scalp UV. In my opinion this is a non-issue. For animal fur with specific color patterns like leopard spots or something, then obviously becomes an issue if you cant map hair color. But for human hair, a noise map to color the hair is fine.
B) If you export out of Blender as obj, the vertices of the polylines arent written as a single line. They are written as vertex pairs. This is a problem in Daz Studio when it comes to setting Line Start Width and Line End Width. And you will see why... If you need a workaround for point B you can go here. Another workaround is to export from blender as tubes and do the 'convert tubes to lines' conversion from tubes within Daz Studio itself, as that will write a contiguous curve. I wrote a post about this method here.
C) This point should be obvious, but be aware that copying/pasting surfaces only works if the surface already has same shader applied. So you will need to apply the same shader before you can copy over materials from the hair.
Thank you so much for taking the trouble to give such a comprehensive response. Other than point C, which I had discovered with my own shader mixer experiments, I wasn't aware of any of it. It is disappointing to learn of yet another feature that Daz chooses to deny users, and I hope we'll see an end to this practice in their extremely expensive tier, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, as you say, it won't be an issue for me here, this is human hair with no unutual colouring requirements.
I look forward to getting back in front ot the Daz machine to experiment and learn from the information here and those great DA posts. Thanks once again!