First, congratulations for your adaptation of this amazing plugin on my favorite software wich is Cinema 4D.
I don't know in wich stage of development the plug is on Maya, but in C4D, it remain some really annoying bugs, espacially when you want to animate your creations.
In my case, this is really simple.
I quickly set up a tied hair style with the last demo version to test the plugin, and just want to stick it to may character, without any dynamics.
<div>I exported it in Ornatrix ABC, and imported it on one of my shots.
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But there is a big issue with that.
If I render the scene from frame 0, the hairs follow the geometry as they does, but if I start at frame 50 for example, It became a big mess !
Obviously, none of these shots begin at frame 0 (because of cloths dynamics and other stuffs) and sometime, I have 2 or 3 cameras with different TC in the same scene.
This issue will force me to compute hundreds of unused and useless frames.
Here is the illustration :
I tried with the "attach root" option of "Baked Hair" and even tried to had a "Ground Strand" and use it's "attach root" option.
I tried to use the animated cache too, but it force me to cache not only the guides but all the hairs also.
It's time and space disk consuming and there is another issue : I need to apply time offsets on some of the computations, otherwise, some of the hair parts have a little delay.
I don't know what to do anymore, I spent 2 days trying to find a solution but there is no perfect one.
I used C4D native hairs for shots where the hairs are untied, and was thinking about using Ornatrix for tied hairs, but now, I hesitate.
Can you send us this scene for testing? That would help us to investigate and debug the issue. If so, please send it to jeordanis .f (at) ephere. com. Include a link to this thread.
Sorry for the delay, not yet. The scene have a loading error that we need to address first. I will increase the priority of this task to get it sorted out sooner.
We fixed the loading issue. I noticed that the animation in the scene is not the same as the one that you are showing in your renders.
As you can see there are two hair strands rotating randomly but we are looking into that. I also tested starting the animation at frame 50 but I get the same results. Note that in this case Ground Strands is not needed because grounding is being done in BakedHair already.
Something to have in mind is that, if you are simulating hair, the way to work with a simulation that starts at an arbitrary frame is simulating a Rest State first. The Moov modifier allows you to do that.
Thanks for your work and your reply. Yes, this is not the same shot, the other one was to long and the alembic to heavy :-) So, if I understand, there is effectively an issue, but it can be solved by the " The Moov modifier" ? Actually, I tried to baked them, but, as in the alembic there are not only the guides but all the hairs, It give me very long and heavy simulations. And the baking solution doesn't resolve the flicking issue that I also mentioned before. By the way, note that I don't need my hairs to be animated. They are tied and I just want them to stick and follow the body correctly.
I have a lot of shots to treat and I'm just trying to keep my pipline as light and as modular as possible.
The hairstyle is composed of several parts (I sent you a very simplified scene), and some effects, like clumps or frizz are applied on the hairs, not only on the guides, for more realism. So the only viable solution for me is to export all these parts in alembic, regroup them in a "BakedHair", that I import in all my shots. It just remain to attach roots and clic render. Simple, quick and effective. And if I want to improve the hair style, I just have to Re-export the modified alembic parts in my comb project, and it update in all the shots. If I change the body animation, that's easy too ...
A very bad scenario will be to be forced to copy/past all the parts of my hairstyle in all the shots, and reroot all these part one by one, knowing that, sometime some hairs change there positions and rotations when we do that. Another bad scenario is to use the alembics export but to be forced to bakes all animations (because of the issue mentioned in this thread) with so much hairs in the alembic. Time consuming, disk space lost, and if I want to improve the animation of the body, I need to bake again, and again, and again ... Unfortunately, at this moment, only these 2 scenarios works for me.
I have also a big end scene of 1250 frames, with all the cameras in it, camera that acts at different time along the sequence. If I want to render the camera 17, which start at F900, I can't afford rendering the 900 fist frames for nothing ...
So, I think we must have the ability to import an alembic and start the rendering at any frame without any other operation escept reroot. This is really import to me, but this is also really important for all artists who want to use Ornatrix in production in C4D.
So, if I understand, there is effectively an issue, but it can be solved by the " The Moov modifier" ?
No. I'm saying that to avoid simulating unnecesary frames every time, you just have to simulate a rest state. In case you use Moov for hair simulation.
The only problem that I can find in the scene is what I mentioned in my previous post. A few guides are not behaving as they should, but someone is already investigating that problem.
Actually, I tried to baked them, but, as in the alembic there are not only the guides but all the hairs, It give me very long and heavy simulations.
You can either bake the guides or bake all the hairs. To bake and export the guides you have to disable Hair from Guides and everything above it. Then it will be a guide object.
So the only viable solution for me is to export all these parts in alembic, regroup them in a "BakedHair", that I import in all my shots. It just remain to attach roots and clic render. Simple, quick and effective.
This workflow should work fine after we address the issue mentioned above.
Another bad scenario is to use the alembics export but to be forced to bakes all animations (because of the issue mentioned in this thread) with so much hairs in the alembic.
Many studios use this workflow to render on a renderfarm. Have in mind that BakedHair modifier have an option to reproduce the amount of hairs shown in the viewport. But I understand that you want to keep it simple.
So, I think we must have the ability to import an alembic and start the rendering at any frame without any other operation escept reroot. This is really import to me, but this is also really important for all artists who want to use Ornatrix in production in C4D.
You can do that. As long as the hair object and the character are aligned. Remember that when you import an alembic hair object you have to attach it to the character, but you will not be able to do that if they are far from each other. Maybe you can just have the character in T-Pose at the beginning of each shot, so you can attach the hair object an continue from there.
In the viewport, it looks like the first picture, everything is ok, on render, it look like the seconde one : The hairs aspect is a blend between the position at F0 and the rendered frame (F115), they are streched to reach the model root position.
I finally found some time to work again on this project and to dig deeper in my tests, and discovered something interesting. It still doesn't work, but only when computed with the "Picture Viewer", and it still have issues with "FurBall" when the attached object is animated.
I have the last version of C4D (R23.110), the last version of Ornatrix (2_2.1.4.26898) and made some simple tests to check several solutions to compute hairs on an animated model. As you can see below, I have several version where I used rigged objects vs alembics pre-baked, "FurBall" vs alembic made from this "Furball", and I started renders from Frame 0 and from Frame 30, because, if you remember, starting a render at non 0 Frame was my principal issue.
On this first test, this is the original scene, with a quick "Furball" comb and a Rigged animated head. We can experiment some flickering in the tail, but starting the render at F30 not seams to be an issue. Good, but what I want is to get the same thing with alembic Ornatrix hairs.
On this second test, I used alembic Ornatrix hairs on a rigged head and on a pre-baked animated model. The result is the same : when the animation start at Frame 0, that work fine.
Now, I re-used this same scene but start the animation at F30, using the "Picture viewer" of C4D which is the main render tool during creation process. The alternative is the "Render Queue", but with this last one, you can't see your render in real time, It's only designed to batch an infinite list of scenes. An as you can see, It doesn't work.
I re-used this same scene again, and decided to compute it in the "Render Queue". And this time, It worked !!!
Is it possible to correct this limitation ? Because as I said, "Picture viewer" display your render in real-time, which is necessary when you work on the development of a scene, the "Render Queue" doesn't ...
What render engine are you using and how do you get it to render the animation WITH the hair in the picture viewer? For me it doesn't render the hair and it only renders frame 100. Sorry, I'm not a C4D user.
I usually work with redshift or Arnold, but these simple tests has been made with C4D standard native render. You'll find the process to compute hairs bellow.
1-Force C4D to Compute hairs and adjusting render parameters : https://ephere.com/download.aspx?message=29694&f=Help-Render_Hairs.jpg
2-Access to both Rendering Methods : Picture Viewer / Render Queue. https://ephere.com/download.aspx?message=29694&f=Help-Render_RQ_PV.jpg
