Poser 6, Lesson 5
A Hairy Week
You got that right! No Anime Flip, no Hi-res Kate. So, I'm trying to make do with what I've got. Here's what I did.
I chose Jessi (what a shock, I know).
I switched to 3-camera view, I using the Right Camera (which, for whatever reason, shows her left side), the top camera, and the face camera.
From the Hair library, I selected Chipped Bob (for reasons which will become evident later).
In the Properties pane for Chipped Bob, I changed the Parent to Universe, which effectively unparented the object. While there, I unchecked Casts Shadows.
Then, using the 3-camera trick (marvellous!), I positioned the hair the way I wanted it (no, it's not perfect, but it's great deal easier with the different views), reparented it to Jessi's head, and Object>Lock Actor (whatever the verb is).
Aha! Now we went back to the Material Room. Somewhere where I'm not so lost. Changed the color of all three swatches to a brunette. The result:
Finally, I took all three and changed them to different colors, to see which part went where. Swatch 3 is green; Swatch 2 is blue; Swatch 3 is red. Now, she's set to go to the rave.
Now, I got Victoria out and begin to grow her hair in the Hair Room. Here's the result (Elapsed time: about 2.5 hours):
Exploring the Hair Room
At this point, I've begun exploring the Hair Room. Results of the exploration will be reported here. This page, (not quite) incidentally, records the steps I took in getting to the final render.
Exploring Lights
A check of some lighting settings can be found here.
Exploring Materials
A series of experiments in the Material Room can be found here. I've noticed that if there are a lot of materials in a object which share the same texture, you can originally assign them to a common name: for example, MetalParts. Then, to test a number of different textures, you duplicate a texture, toss the old MetalParts, rename the duplicate MetalParts, return to Poser 6 and render. Viola! (or are those cellos?)