ZBrushCentral

trying to get photorealistic hair in the workflow

Community
#1

Hello all!

To get photorealistic hair, I was torn between two routes, but if anybody has suggestions, I’m all ears!.. (Of course ZBrush is indespensible in the workflow.)

  1. I could purchase a faculty version (I’m a Photoshop teacher at a college in Tampa, FL) of XSI advanced and be done with it. Good hair to be had in there. Plus Mental Ray can hardly be beat. But then I plan to market my work, and no way can I afford the commercial license of $3500.

  2. I have Hexagon 2, but it’s so buggy. But Carrara 5 is stable, and I like the rendering engine. Except you can’t mirror the X axis in there when modelling a face, and I ain’t into the old “duplicate and flip” workaround. I could bring a skull cap model into Poser 6, create the hair in there, then use the TransPoser utility to bring that back into Carrara, and fit this “wig” onto my imported ZBrush creations. (Carrara handles displacement maps from ZBrush very well.) But I’ve never tried this actual workflow, and don’t even know if it will deliver the hair results I seek. My theory is that with some finesse, I could coax some good hair out of Poser. That’s my only interest in it right now. Seems like a basic alternative to the hair engine in XSI.

Any suggestions? I just need to be able to produce sweet photorealistic hair to go with the photorealistic caricatures I’m itching to create. It’s not that I’m trying to do this on the cheap, but am not interested in animation, and so wondered if I could pull it off without XSI.

Like I said, I’m all ears. (But I did not like modo much, as there was no real “tweak” tool, like in Hexagon and Silo. The tweak tool is the foundation of my modelling to exaggerate a face.)

Thanks in advance, and best wishes,
Chris Collins
www.chriscartoon.com

#2

Cinema 4D is, I believe, less expensive than XSI and has a hair module that they released recently.

I’m sure that many other animation packages have hair as well. Rendered hair is all the rage these days.

Of course, the question is: will you be animating your caricatures or will they be still renders? I have never seen rendered hair that can match a talented artist’s hair painted in post-render with Photoshop.

#3

To have the hair functionality in XSI you have to pay 5300$. And that’s a special right now. Usually its even more expensive. It’s a HUGE package but SoftImage does not offer hair in any lower level.

Along with Hair goes also the ability to use any geometry as ‘hair’. You can make Grass and

C4D from Maxon can do the same for a fraction. It wont include other options like ‘Behaviour’ which controls groups of people or animals or Syflex Cloth engines. But it does the Hair thing very very well.

Go, download the Maxon Demo. Fully functional, and does not expire. Well… saving does not work, but the renders do not have watermarks. So you can play and even enjoy.

Cheers
Lemo

#4

The full version of Lightwave is on sale right now and includes “Sasquatch Lite: Hair and fur rendering using Sasquatch rendering engine, also excellent for grass and foliage. The Sasquatch engine is the fastest, highest quality hair renderer in the industry”.(quote is theirs)

I bought a copy but have not had a chance to try it out yet. The full version with electronic manual is $495.00 and with the printed manual is $595.00. The documentation is huge! Includes every last detail) They also have a bundle with Vue 5 Infinite and the printed manual for $895.00. Infinite does awesome landscapes and has ecosystems but the renderer is slow and its use of memory seems inefficient to me. But the renders! Infinite also does not use displacement which is another downer. However the workflow between them is supposed to be simple and as soon as 9 is out I understand a plugin will be available for direct import. Lightwave is nothing to be sneezed at though. Great tool set. I do not know how Sasquatch lite compares to the full version. Maybe someone else here can answer that.

The sale I think is about to end as version 9 is nearly out of beta. Anyone with a liscense can get the beta right now. If you buy 8.5, you get 9 for free. I think the price goes to nearly $1,500.00 when this promotion ends.

#5

Thanks so much you all! Will try demos of C4D and Lightwave.