Manipulating strand based hair products?

DrHemulen

Is it possible to manipulate strand based hair products? 

I bought a few (like https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-strand-based-late-summer-bangs-style-hair-for-genesis-9) and they all look amazing until you start posing you model, and notice that gravity doesn't affect them. Dforce does not do much, which is also stated in the readme for the products.

It is of course the same with all kinds of hair products, but for old style card based hair, I usually take them into Zbrush and manipulate them manually which I am happy with. However exporting strand based hair to Zbrush doesn't work.

Does anybody have a good workflow. Is it possible to use the stand based hair grooming tools on published products? I have not been able to get them to open. Or is there another way, via blender or something else?

lilweep

The new meshgrabber which comes with premiere was advertised as being able to manipulate these dforce strand based hair. I don't have it so cannot comment on whether it actually can do this. The video demonstrations are a bit suspicious. (Also wouldt it have made more sense to put this feature into the SBH editor rather than meshgrabber?)

Richard Haseltine

lilweep said:

The new meshgrabber which comes with premiere was advertised as being able to manipulate these dforce strand based hair. I don't have it so cannot comment on whether it actually can do this. The video demonstrations are a bit suspicious. (Also wouldt it have made more sense to put this feature into the SBH editor rather than meshgrabber?)

Are you sure? Strand-based hair and Mesh Grabber/Geometry Sculptor are separate tools developed by external PAs, although the former at least has been further developed by Daz developers. As a result there is no reason to expect them to interact more readily than other tools, and regardless of Strand Based hair actual dForce hair is editable only by PAs (and may not come from Strand Based Hair at all).

lilweep

Richard Haseltine said:

lilweep said:

The new meshgrabber which comes with premiere was advertised as being able to manipulate these dforce strand based hair. I don't have it so cannot comment on whether it actually can do this. The video demonstrations are a bit suspicious. (Also wouldt it have made more sense to put this feature into the SBH editor rather than meshgrabber?)

Are you sure? Strand-based hair and Mesh Grabber/Geometry Sculptor are separate tools developed by external PAs, although the former at least has been further developed by Daz developers. As a result there is no reason to expect them to interact more readily than other tools

Im only quoting what they claimed in this video. I cant be held accountable for disinformation for quoting what was stated in a video that is still online:

lilweep

Richard Haseltine said:

actual dForce hair is editable only by PAs (and may not come from Strand Based Hair at all).

actuall dforce hair is marketed as Strand based Hair on the daz marketplace, which is why customers use SBH and dforce hair interchangeably and dont understand the differences.

simultatable cloth hair is also arguably dforce hair technically

Daz should standardise the terms. 

crosswind

Yes, as lilweep said, Mesh Grabber 4.0, aka Geometry Sculptor in DS 4.23 can deform SBH. However, this tool only works well on SBH with Hair Generation Mode > Root Radius rather than > Target Surfaces. If you have Premier, you can give it a try.

Actually with such an SBH that you want more draping from it, you can easily tweak it Hair Simulation settings as below:

1) Got to Surfaces pane, select the hair Surfaces that you want them drape more, drastically reduce Contraint Stiffness values (ss1)

2) Also reduce value of Friction (ss2)... and better dial some morphs to make the strands away from the shoulders if they don't drape (ss3)

Then simulate. You'll make it drape much better. The tricks can work on most of the SBHs. But don't expect the hairlines drape like a waterfall which might not be really goodlooking.

Edit: AFAIK and AFAIE, polylines of SBH cannot be GoZ to ZBrush. So if you want to deform it outside of DS, you can do it with Blender by exporting base polylines of the hair, reshaping it in Blender with Edit Mode, and imporing as a morph back to DS.