My Millennium Horse Dynamic Hair Project
Well today it’s been back to an old project for me as I needed to render a horse with realistic hair in Carrara.
I worked on this a few years ago using the Millennium Horse <Mil Horse) model which was real a pain as all in built geometry based hair first had to be removed from the figure meaning that you then lost all of the morphs along with it. I had managed to render and animate my version (morphless) until my old pc literally blew up and I lost everything that wasn’t backed up onto DVD.
When I first though of restarting this project I immediately though of using the successor to the Millennium Horse, the new Daz Horse 2 model only to find that as a Daz Studio Triad model it will only work with Carrara 8.5 and above, (which upgrade is pretty low on my list of priorities at this moment in time) so I had to go back to the MilHorse for my hirsute experiment.
So I had to work out how to transfer the morphs to the hairless MilHorse cr2 that I made, without having to do them all one at a time by hand, exporting the morphed objs and stripping the hair geometry before re importing them as morph targets one by one…
I finally settled on using Daz Studio, morph transfer which is usually used for clothing and it worked much better than I expected, some of the combined morphs didn’t come over and for some reason face pose presets don’t work with it even though manual expressions do, neither did the controls that change the leg, neck and knee height but I am pretty pleased so far.
Next job was to test the horse in Carrara 8.0 and then add some hair to it. First thing I realised was that the few hair objects that I had managed to salvage from my back up Dvds wouldn’t work as the base geometry had a different name and possibly a different vertex count? So I have had to start again from scratch. The following renders are where I am so far without using the hair length and density maps that I need to remake. The first image is of the horse morphs in Carrara with the Daz draft horse (not my own) applied.
I plan on eventually making geometry based mane & tail for the mil horse for use in Studio & Poser and hopefully offering it for sale at Daz along with the Carrara hair.
Hello! The hair you are making looks gorgeous so far, I’m sure it’ll come out stellar 🙂
Do you have an email listed anywhere? I found your facebook but it seems to last have been updated from what I can tell in 2011, and I want to be sure I’m messaging the right person/not a fake account. I’ve got some questions if you don’t mind answering them? I’m new to 3D modeling, and am looking to make some morphs for the Mil Horse — and when I get it, the Daz Horse 2.
Also — the website looks great! Loving the color scheme 🙂
Hi Britney, lovely to hear from you! I’m happy that you like what I’ve done so far, working woth the dynamic hair can be very slow and frustrating lol. I do have a FaceBook page that I really need to update, I do update my Google+ page more often as I prefer the interface. I don’t display my email publicly as I had to abandon my older accounts due to being overwhelmed with spam but I have a contact form on the About Me page on here that goes straight through to my gmail account, http://ladyfyre-graphics.com/home2/about-me/ and I will help you with any questions that I can from there.
I’m glad you like the website redesign too 🙂 It is a very different direction to the old one but I wanted to begin this year with a bright fresh start, plus the colours make me cheerful lol.