Proxxie's 3D Hair Salon (Patreon)

Greetings!

I've spent the last several days trying to fix the hair for Ana and Alex's models, and I've finally ended up with something I'm mostly happy with. To recap, I discovered that their hair models wouldn't render correctly in the new version of my 3D software, Daz 4.11. It still renders fine under the previous 4.10, but my shiny, expensive new video card won't work with the older version, so if I used that I'd have to render with the CPU, which would take forever. And it's no longer being supported anyway, so I figured it's for the best if I figure out how to make the hair look right under the new version.

Getting this done was the last obstacle I needed to tackle before getting started on the H-scene for this release so I was pretty motivated to finish, but I wanted to make sure it was done right! It ended up taking quite a while, since I had to get really into the weeds with the shaders, make all sorts of custom opacity maps in Photoshop, and run tons of test renders. But I'm pretty pleased with it overall, especially for Ana.

Ana's hair was the biggest problem, and for reference, here's how it originally looked:

And this set of images shows how I went about fixing the problem. The leftmost image is how her hair rendered in 4.11 - it's awful, and shows why I had to fix it. The middle image shows my first attempt at a fix, which I showed in a previous post. Better, but still not good. The last image is how it looks now. 

And I think it looks pretty good! I can't decide if I like it more than the original or not, but in any case I've submitted a bug report to Daz so hopefully they'll fix whatever's causing it. Note that the color of Ana's skin isn't exactly right on this one; I put this together to show off the hair, so I didn't spend a lot of time getting the skin tone perfect.

Now on to Alex. Alex's hair was less of a problem, but still kind of bad. The reason Alex's doesn't look as bad as Ana's in 4.11 is because of its lighter color, not any differences in how Daz is treating the mesh and shader. I rendered a version of Alex with black hair in 4.11, and it looks almost as bad as Ana's did.

For reference, here's how Alex's hair looked until the Daz update:

And this image shows the same sort of progression I did for Ana:

The difference between the second and third pics isn't as pronounced this time, but I do think it looks better. I thought I liked the original better, but looking at it again, I'm not sure I do. Anyway, I think it looks pretty good.

Now that this is done, it's on to the H-scene! By the way, if you're inclined to check out the transmog test build I have up, please do! I haven't gotten any feedback on it yet.

That's all for this time - thank you for your support!