Hi all,

I have started experimenting with dynamic hair in Poser (version 7) and the 
possibilities to get acceptable results in POV-Ray. As I am in need of an 
old man with a bald pat and a beard, I included beard building into the 
experiment. I shall not detail here the work needed in Poser, that will be 
treated in due time in the povray.tools.poser newsgroup. What I want now is 
some unbiased opinion about the *looks* of the figure under different 
conditions.

Poseray has the (experimental) possibility to convert lines (and that is how 
Poser converts dynamic hair) into ribbons. The width of the ribbons 
determines how the hair or the beard is going to look like, so my first 
series of experiments concerns their variation. One of the reasons for these 
experiments is to explore what additional settings would be needed in 
Poseray for a realistic render of hair and beard. So, FlyerX, pay attention 
:-)

A following series of experiments will concern texturing. Tipically, Poser 
does not uv map its dynamic hair it seems. However, using ribbons, this 
would be an interesting possibility in Poseray/POV-Ray. In the present set 
of images, I used a simple color_map of greys.

About the images: The top one is a render in Poser of the figure with the 
standard texture generated. No changes were made. The figure is based on the 
Apollo Maximus figure. The next set of four images shows the conversion of 
the hair and beard, and the width settings of the ribbons used each time. 
One amelioration I could suggest offhand already is to use a second set of 
hairs at the transition between beard (or hair) and skin, the outer one 
being more sparsely populated. Just to smooth the transition more 
realistically.

Regards,

Thomas

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