Re: Blacksmith beta 7 News of a dedicated Poser trans map hair/ OBJ creation tool has been long awaited...Bravo!!! Good move on that, developers have been neglecting this much needed tool for too long. Unfortunately I don't have the patience to wait on the hair room in Poser to do it's calculating despite using a high spec machine, it's still too slow,...I'm not hating though, Smith Micro still has my respect.

Hello MrFiddles22,

Yes, there is an awesome new tool in Blacksmith3D. You can create strands, place and move them, paint your textures and transparency maps with precision...But you can also modify existing hair!! It creates low poly hair and you can use all the morphs tool in addition to the hair tool to get more realism...really a great job from the development team!!!

Take some time to have a look at the tutorial, you will learn faster, even if it is a very intuitive tool.

Hope you will enjoy it,

Best regards,

Those are some great, well thought out features! Exactly what I have been hoping for. I dread having to model hair from scratch, when all I really need is some low poly strips, a trans map, and a simple way to style those poly strips, you know what I mean?

Hopefully it's processing speed will make use of (or in the future) computers with high core CPU's and/or multiple GPU set ups, or GPU acceleration if needed. "I have the need for speed" what ever gets me from point A to B the quickest way possible, without slumping over in my chair, drooling waiting for things to compute.

I am little bit scarred from the time I spent, and hours of my life waisted trying to get the Poser hair room to produce some decent results. Admittedly I have never used the Blacksmith program, although I did buy the Pro 6 version recently, so I look forward to using it.

One thing that comes to mind regarding the poly strips, and this may already be a feature, but I would like to throw this idea out there. Have the poly strips size, width, tips, roots and vertice count (or poly segments) adjustable, to better match the shape of the trans map being used. The reason being, if dynamics were applied to them, they could behave and collide more accurately with the face, body and clothes, and with more or less poly segments be stiffer or more flexible depending on the amount used.

For example a hair strip that has a trans mapped spikey or pointy end with a closely matching poly strip will collide more realistically than a excessively wide flat poly strip, because the invisible edge portion of the strip will end up colliding with the character face or clothes unnaturally, does that make sense?

Hello MrFiddles22,

You can decide at strand creation the length and wide division of your strip (root and end will be automatically set up and square UV mapping will be created). After, you can tweak as you want your strip to match your needs. I did not tested dynamics with it but achieved realistic results with basic rigging and very little weight mapping correction.

Hope it replies,

Best regards,

fly028 - Where is the tutorial? I've been looking but . . .

Hello Pruiz,

There is a pdf manual in the installation folder.

Best regards,

Thanks - stupid me - the last place to look - the manual.

Hello Pruiz,

So, I'm stupid too!!! Took me time to find it :-)

Best regards,

Is it in the text of the manual? Hard to follow - I'm trying to figure out where the tutorial examples are located?

Hello Pruiz,

Quite easy to use, i did learn without a clue.

If you want to create from scratch: Load a base character as obj and a scalp created for this base character as obj too. Select your scalp as object, In manager, under material, select your scalp and define it as grow area (right click, hair option, define material as grow surface) now, go in hair tab and pick the strand creator icon. Set your values in the right tab (begin with default settings, it works well). Drag your mouse on the scalp (not a large one). It will create a strand already uv mapped (root on top, end on bottom) Turn your viewport to be on top of the strand and with the rotate tool, (check select to tip) place your mouse very near the root and start bending. Rotate your view and now, with the move tool (I use 30 for size), place your strand. With the copy and paste, you can duplicate your strand and adjust each strand manually You can work with symmetry if needed. Scalp material should be set as grow surface and strand will be automatically set to hairstrand material. You can create new material if needed. There are many tools to deform the strands. (twist, grow, smooth,....)

The hair section start at page 96 in the manual Examples are supposed to be located in the library (i did not checked if there were in the package, sorry) I will have a look and ask if there are missing.

Hope it helps to start,

Best regards,

Thanks for this. What is the hair exportable as?

Hello Pruiz,

I use to export it as obj to do rigging in Poser or DAZ.

Best regards,

I see the example is Toulouse hair from Daz. If I import a hair from Poser the scullcap seems not to appear. So maybe this is only applicable to Daz Hair?

Hello Pruiz,

No, it is just because there is a transparency map applied to it and transparency channel is set to 100%. Set scalp material transparency setting to zero and you will be able to see it again,

Best regards,

Hello Pruiz,

I did test toulouse hair, just double click on the object in the manager tab and set "draw double sided" and you will see again the geometry. Select "base" material and set it as grow surface.

Best regards,

Hi fly028, Thanks for the double sided tip - really important. I am importing hair as .obj from Poser library - make modifications and export as .obj. When I import into Daz it is there but invisible - tried resetting surfaces but still no luck. I can import poser hair into Daz no problem. Is there a setting in import that I'm missing?

Hello Pruiz,

The best to export a daz product to obj is to make it from DAZ. Should be related to poser export.I did my export from DAZ and Scalp is visible. You can also check in Blacksmith 3D by setting display groups by material, hide strands and hair and see if you cansee "base". If so, like in mine, export without maps and reimport in blacksmith3d and it should be ok

Hope it helps

Hi, Is the hair tutorial just text in the manual? It says screen shots but none are there. Where do I find the "Hair example project 01Blacksmith3dHair project the manual tells me to load? Cheerio lululee

Hello Lululee,

The manual is still under construction, it's only a beta and it's time consuming to write a good text and get good screenshots. It will be complete soon. As i mentioned in another post, example project are missing in the first release, i did send a mail to the team to try to correct the package. AS there were many changes during the process of creating the "hair tool", maybe the team is doing new example projects matching to the latest build.

I describe rapidly the process for creating hair (above in the discuss) if it can help.

Hope it replies,

Best regards,

Thnaks so much for the info. Cheerio lululee

The manual keeps telling to use the Hair Comb tool, but there isn't one, so I'm assuming the equivalent is the Hair Move tool, right?

fly028 posted at 12:57PM Sun, 23 April 2017 - #4303087

Hello Pruiz,

Quite easy to use, i did learn without a clue.

If you want to create from scratch: Load a base character as obj and a scalp created for this base character as obj too. Select your scalp as object, In manager, under material, select your scalp and define it as grow area (right click, hair option, define material as grow surface)

Can't get this far. There is no hair option to define the grow surface. Last thing on right click list is Template options. There is nothing below or following this option. 'version 6.9.93.0.

LadyDrakana, I think I know this one, and it took me a bit to find it too. Double click on the Materials and it will expand to show stuff underneath. You can then right click on your object to see the hair options.

Thank you DestinysGarden. I did finally figure it out. Also figured out that I was being impatient because I hurt my foot and it was bothering me. So I took a break. Foot was much better today. So was Blacksmith 3d.

Glad you found it LD. Being in pain just makes every little small thing seem huge. I know how it is.

My next question-is it possible to move the strands without them curving up so much on the tips? I cant get the Strand Move tool to give me anything but an S curve, which is great for the root, but I want the tips straight, or actually curved inward. Thanks for any input.

When you say that you want to move the strands without them curling up on the tips, are you using the Strand Move, the Strand Curl or the Strand Wave? Each one of these tools has an "Auto-Selection" that is the Clicked Point by default. But, you can change that (in the tool tab on the right) to be root or tip and play around with the Strength, Size or Hardness of your selection and the Wave (or Curl) Size. If you want the tips curved in, try the Curl Wave set to the tips.

Strand Move. When you create the new strand, it stands straight up, so the Strand Move is needed to set the initial flow path to follow the scalp line, if I have the workflow correct.Strand Move set to Tip at a fairly high size seems to give the easiest way to get the initial contour of the hair flow. You create the hair strand, you want to bend it around to frame the face, but not curve out at the tips, what tool and settings should be used?

When you use Clicked Point it bends in the middle (or at the clicked point) and when you use Root it bends at the root (obviously, LOL). Using the Tip selection flows the entire strand very naturally with a curve at the root. It is the curve at the tip that I'm getting that I would like to avoid. Placing the initial strands is the challenge point for me. If I could choose a C curve or L curve instead of an S curve for the move Tip option my life would be golden.I hope that makes sense.

I'll play around a bit more with the Root, Clicked Point, Tip and strength settings to see if I can come up with something workable. It is totally possible I'm missing the magic combination.I'll also try the Curl Waves on Tip too. Thanks for the tip

While I have your attention, if there was an option to move strands on the XYZ axis (red/green/blue) ,like most modeling programs use, instead of just based on camera viewpoint, it would go a long way to quality of life and time spent issues. I find I'm spending a huge amount of time rotating the camera so I can move a strand toward the body, then I have to rotate again so I can move the strand up or down.

I am a full time content vendor. I really love the ease of the hair creation tools in this beta. Really good job. Creating the hair strips is super easy, and in conjunction with the morphing tools, you may have a winner here. I'd love to be able to use Blacksmith3D in my production workflow, and to recommend it to my vendor friends.

Can I install this without it overwriting my existing BlackSmith Version?

@ IO4, Yes, our software is made to install without over-writing previous versions. I put all of mine on my D drive, so my list of B3D folders is very long due to testing internal alpha versions.

@DestinysGarden, if I understand you correctly, it sounds like you're happy with the results except the tip area, so you should be able to use the strand straightener or strand wave (to go the other direction) on the tip.

@DestinysGarden, Also, when Post Unwarp is set to 100%, it should take care of most of ( what appears to be ) curling of the tips. With the tip selected after using a hair tool, you could also try using the "Touchup Hammer" in the morph tools with the Type set to "Flatten", and that should take care of it. Please note that the morph tools will work on the hair too.

And, thought we don't have XYZ displacements, can constrain the motion to a particular axis (so it is almost the same), unless the viewing angle is too harsh. So, to constrain the motion to the X axis, then lock Y and Z. ( don't forget to unlock them when finished ). The other is to use the arrow keys to quickly rotate the viewing angle from front/left/top etc. so going from one angle to the other can be quite fast. Toggling the F3 key also offers rapid viewport rotations.

If you haven't already, you should also try using the symmetry to help speed up the process. Then, turn it off to tweak individual hair strands after you get the overall shape in place to reduce the patterned look.