Who here uses Carrara to create hair models for Poser characters? How do you do it? I've tried a couple of different methods, but am having problems getting the final models to come out right. For instance, I made a great hair model using cyliders created in the spline modeller for the hair. When I export it as an obj and map it, the texture maps come out just the way I want them to. Every strand of hair had the same material assigned to it, so I only had to take that material and remap it cylindrically to get a nice simple grid that I can easily use in the template for texture maps. Unfortunately, the spline model has an extremely high polygon count, making it unusable in Poser. I've tried reducing the surface fidelity during export, only to wind up with a low polygon count and a very blocky looking model.

I also have made a vertex based hair model, using long strips of polygons to create locks of hair (the onion skin method of creating hair). It exports nicely, very low polygon count, and it looks good. However, the texture mapping is a problem. UVMapper gives me a separate texture for each master object created in Carrara (all the strips created with a particular master object are listed as having their own material even though I assigned the same material to all the strips). And each individual strip of hair has to be remapped to so I can get all their maps to lie in a flat grid.

There's got to be a simpler way! What am I doing wrong? Does anybody have any ideas? I really would like to take the hair models I create in Carrara and use them in Poser, but I don't know how to get this to work with out a ridiculous amount of work. BTW, I am using Carrara 2.
Helen
www.pixelarcana.com