The composite image in p.b.i. illustrates the comments I give here.

In preparation for th creation of some fur (but, why not? moustaches... 
beards....) I wnated first to see how that would look in the Hair Room of 
Poser. I put some rapid hair-growing unguent on a featureless ball and, lo! 
Hair was growing all over. That is what you see in the upper left hand 
rendered image.

I then exported the hairy ball and opened it in Poseray (upper right hand 
image), checking 'show lines' in the Preview window. First thing to note is 
that the Poser material seems not to have been taken into account. The 
hairs/lines are black, but they look fairly identical to the Poser render.

I did not change the settings in the Groups\Lines window and, as a first 
test, did not 'Convert all lines to ribbons'. I exported to POV-Ray and 
rendered (background image). What immediately becomes obvious is that the 
hair group and the ball are not coincident anymore. The hair group is much 
smaller and translated upwards. A second thing is that the lines have been 
exported as CSG cylinders. That might slow down the parsing/render time if 
large numbers are involved. Referenced mesh2 objects would be better of 
course. On the other hand, those are lines, not directly intended to play 
the role of 'hair' but only as 'guides' for the 'ribbons'. In fact, they 
could be commented out by default in the POV-Ray export.

---------------------------------------------------This is as far as the 
shown image 
go ----------------------------------------------------------------------

In a second phase, which I want first to explore a little more (especially 
concerning the material part), I have converted the lines to ribbons, and I 
can already say that those export correctly (in terms of scale and location) 
and as mesh2 objects to POV-Ray. However, changing the width of the ribbons 
in Poseray seems not to work... Furthermore, using the ribbons, I wonder if 
one should not now use an adequate hair image map, combined with a 
transparant map, to get a correct result. I shall explore those 
possibilities.

Thomas

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"Thomas de Groot" <t.d### [at] internlDOTnet> schreef in bericht 
news:46792392$1@news.povray.org...
The second image in p.b.i. illustrates the comments I give here.
>
> In a second phase, which I want first to explore a little more (especially 
> concerning the material part), I have converted the lines to ribbons, and 
> I can already say that those export correctly (in terms of scale and 
> location) and as mesh2 objects to POV-Ray. However, changing the width of 
> the ribbons in Poseray seems not to work... Furthermore, using the 
> ribbons, I wonder if one should not now use an adequate hair image map, 
> combined with a transparant map, to get a correct result. I shall explore 
> those possibilities.
>

Comments:

What I did for the second image was add hair image maps in Poser (add a 
little breeze) and convert the lines to ribbons in Poseray. The geometry 
file is 35MB (hair density in Poser says 2046 hairs). A first experiment 
with 'Breaks' >2, did not decrease the ribbon width, although I had also 
divided Root- and Tip width by 10. I am not sure what 'Breaks' do to the 
ribbons...

The shown image has Root width = 0.001 and Tip width = 0.0005 and Breaks = 
2.

I did not export the Lines from Poseray. This works well, but an empty 
union{} is created in the geometry file, leading to a warning message.

The use of image maps seems to work well, although I am not sure if scale is 
correct, nor if the bump map and transparancy map are doing their job.

From the shadow, it looks like the sphere is not casting any. I cannot 
explain this.

A render with radiosity becomes very slow.

The results are - I believe - encouraging as far as dynamic hair is 
concerned. The export by Poseray looks already satisfying but needs further 
improvements.


Thomas

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I can also add to this that I could make 'Breaks' work, but except for 
increasing the file size to 80MB (Breaks = 5) there is no visible 
improvement to the image.

Thomas

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"Thomas de Groot" <t.d### [at] internlDOTnet> wrote:
> I can also add to this that I could make 'Breaks' work, but except for
> increasing the file size to 80MB (Breaks = 5) there is no visible
> improvement to the image.
>
> Thomas

Thank you for this post Thomas, I didn't know how to get dynamic hair
exported to POV-Ray.

Janet

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"Janet" <par### [at] attnet> schreef in bericht 
news:web.46808fe137d8cb462383e1e30@news.povray.org...
>
> Thank you for this post Thomas, I didn't know how to get dynamic hair
> exported to POV-Ray.
>

<grin> I didn't either, until FlyerX drew my attention to 'Lines' in 
Poseray, some time ago. In experimental stage, but already an interesting 
development I guess.

Thomas

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