Perfect Hair. Manual Version 1.0

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Perfect Hair Manual Version 1.0 Content Important Information...1 Copyright...1 Disclaimer...1 Usage Rights...1 1. Overview...2 2. User Interface...2 3. Perfect Hair Options...3 3.1. Color...3 3.2. Ambient.

1 Perfect Hair Manual Version 1.0 Content Important Information...1 Copyright...1 Disclaimer...1 Usage Rights Overview User Interface Perfect Hair Options Color Ambient Translucence Brilliance Highlights Bump Waves Other Parameters Configuration Files...7 Ralf Sesseler Dimension 3D Internet: d3d.sesseler.de

2 Important Information Copyright Perfect Hair is Copyright 2011 by Ralf Sesseler. All rights reserved. Disclaimer There is no warranty beyond the legal minimal warranty. In no case, the author shall be liable for any damage on hardware or software caused by using Perfect Hair. Usage Rights There are no limitations in using the shader trees created by Perfect Hair. Of course, this only applies to the shader itself, but not to copyrighted texture files used by the shader from the original material setting

3 1. Overview Perfect Hair is a Python script for Poser to set up the materials for layered, transparency-mapped hair objects. The script can change the hair color, create realistic highlights, and set up other parameters. Also, it may turn straight hair into wavy. Before you start the script, select the hair figure or hair prop in the scene that you want to modify. 2. User Interface The user interface of Perfect Hair consists of three parts. On the left side is a list with the materials of the hair object. All changes are applied only to the materials that are selected in this list. By default, all materials except Preview are selected. When you start the script again for the same hair, your last selection is restored. Right to the material list are the hair material options. Each line is an option consisting of the name, a check mark to activate the option, and the value. The value may be numeric, a color, or a selection. Numeric values range from 0 to 100 and are set by the slider. Color values have a button to open a color selection dialog. Selection values have a button to open a dialog to change the selection. Indented options belong to the non-indented option above it. (See next section for details about the options.) At the bottom are the control buttons: OK: applies the options and closes the script dialog Apply: applies the options without closing the script dialog Swap UV: swaps the UV-orientation for the highlights and closes the script dialog (see the highlights option for details) Close: closes the script dialog Select: opens a menu for quick (de)selection of the check marks that activate the options Load: opens a menu to select a preset to load Save: opens a dialog to enter a name for the preset to save Delete: opens a menu to select a preset to delete Presets A preset saves and restores all settings for the options. There are three predefined presets. Reset resets all options. Default loads the default setting. (If you save a preset with the name default, it will replace this default setting.) Last Used loads the settings that were used the last time you pressed the Apply or OK button

3. Perfect Hair Options There are five different modes to apply the options: Apply: applies all settings Apply (No wave): applies all settings except wave Apply (Wave only): applies the wave settings

4 3. Perfect Hair Options There are five different modes to apply the options: Apply: applies all settings Apply (No wave): applies all settings except wave Apply (Wave only): applies the wave settings only Reset and Apply: resets the material and applies all settings Modify: modifies values only With the Reset mode, the material is reset to default values and only the maps for color, bump, and transparency are reused. The Apply modes adjust the structure of the shader according to the selected options, they will add or modify selected options and remove deselected options. Use the Modify mode to adjust the values for selected options only without changing the structure of the shader. Note: The result for many parameters of the Perfect Hair script may depend on both, the geometry of the hair object and the texture maps used by the initial material. Thus, results may vary and you may need to find the best setting by trying Color The color option tints the texture map of the hair. (If not activated, the color is not changed, except for the reset mode, which sets the color to white.) The color is set as diffuse color, so it will tint the texture map by multiplying it with the color, so the result depends much on the color of the texture map. Different hair colors by a gray map based on a black hair texture map - 3 -

If you additionally check the Gray Map option, the map is turned into grayscale, so you can set any color you like. The parameter controls how bright the grayscale map is.

5 If you additionally check the Gray Map option, the map is turned into grayscale, so you can set any color you like. The parameter controls how bright the grayscale map is. A brighter map will darken the selected color less, but it also has less contrast. Again, the result depends much on the texture map, so you may need to find the best value by trial and error Ambient Ambient makes the hair glowing. Of course, this is not a real property of hair, but a slight amount of ambient may let the hair look more natural in some cases, in particular for light hair. This depends much on the hair color and the scene lighting, so I would use ambient only if the hair looks unnatural otherwise. In particular, ambient can be used to simulate lighting effects from bright sun light. The hair may look dull if these effects are missing Translucence Because layered hair models single strands of hair, each layer is not really opaque, but the light may shine through it to some extent. This effect is achieved in a Poser material by using translucence. However, translucence is mainly reasonable if there is some distance between the single hair layers, e.g. for curly hair. Like ambient, I would recommend to use translucence only, if the hair looks unnatural otherwise. diffuse (top left), with translucence (top right), with ambient (bottom left), both (bottom right) - 4 -

highlights for hair. It is controlled by five parameters. The first parameter controls the strength of the highlights.

6 3.4. Brilliance Brilliance adds a small amount of overall highlights to the hair. (This is done by a blinn node.) 3.5. Highlights Brilliance: none (left), 50 (middle), 100 (right) Different settings for highlights The highlights option creates the typical stretched highlights for hair. It is controlled by five parameters. The first parameter controls the strength of the highlights. (Because the highlights are done by an anisotropic node, the strength will also depend on the horizontal and vertical parameters.) The color tints the highlights, a slight blue tone often looks more realistic than plain - 5 -

7 white. The size parameter controls the overall size, horizontal the horizontal size, and vertical the vertical size. For stretched highlights, set one of horizontal or vertical to a high value and the other to a very low value. The highlights should be stretched orthogonally to the direction of the hair, usually this is the horizontal direction. Because these directions are absolute for the scene and independent of the position and orientation of the figure, you may need to switch them, e.g. if the figure is lying. This is what the Swap UV button is doing Bump The bump parameter sets the bump strength. If no bump map is present, this parameter has a red color. If you activate it nonetheless, the texture map is used as bump map as well. In many cases, this works pretty well and yields better results than using no bump map at all. In particular the highlights look more realistic with a bump map Waves Different styles of wavy hair The waves option creates waves on straight hair. This is done by displacement, so you have to enable use displacement maps in the render settings to make this effect visible in the render. Also, this option will replace any displacement map that were used by the material before. Because displacement depends on the UV-mapping of the geometry, it is only possible for hair materials where the single hair are mapped horizontally or vertically. The waves parameter itself controls the strength of the waves, i.e. the distance for the displacement. Orientation determines the direction in regard to the UV-mapping. Size controls the frequency of the wave. (The actual wave size depends also on the UV-mapping and the hair length.) With shift, you can change the starting point of the waves and shift them along the wave direction

8 Irregular determines the amount of irregularity for the waves, while irr. size controls the size of this irregularity. Without irregularity, the waves might look unnatural. Finally, the shape of the waves may be changed by the shape parameter. The value 50 creates a true sine wave. Smaller values make the waves more triangular, higher values more rectangular Other Parameters With filtering, you can set the filter type for the image maps used in the hair materials. Because of the fine structure of hair, quality will look best in most cases. Because each hair layer usually consists of a single plane of polygons, the backside of the polygons may become visible in the render. In that case, activating normals forward for the material is recommended. This can be done by setting the normals parameter to forward. With remove unused nodes, all shader nodes are removed from the modified materials that are no longer used. 4. Configuration Files Perfect Hair uses two configuration files. Perfect Hair.pre contains the saved presets including the default setting. Perfect Hair.cfg provides some additional options that you can set by editing this file in a text editor. It has the following options: pos_x and pos_y are the initial position of the dialog on the screen. on_top can be set to 1 to keep the dialog on top of other windows (Windows only). auto_update has to be set to 0 to disable the automated update of Poser while the dialog is open; this may be necessary if the update causes problems. Set enter_ok to 0 to assign the enter key to the Apply button instead of the OK button

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