POSER 5 hair to CINEMA 4D*

by Segart

Update 31/05/04

IMPORTANT: This tutorial made reference to the "morphloader" plugin for Cinema 4D, but unfortunatly the site is down. Instead of exporting your hair from Poser with obj format, use lightwave (lwo). It worked for me in C4D v. 8.2. Follow the tutorial as close as you can, but you'll find some differences. Don't worry, we only needed morphloader to get our hair mesh inside cinema with the correct point order (the default obj import in C4D changes this order). And lwo works fine, but as I mentioned, I only tested with 8.2. In the part about correcting the skullcap you can ignore it and resize the hair directly in Cinema, or you can export it from Poser (also like lwo), import it in C4D, shape it to fit the head of your model an re-export it to Poser like a morph target (I think it should work).

Hi,

All the images may take a while to download, so maybe you'd like to read the text and open the programs in the meanwhile.

Fisrt of all, sorry for the bad english.

Poser 5 is a very powerful system to setup hair in a fast and easy way (compared to other software) and best of all, you can use hair that is already been created or you can find new ways to give to you personnal creations the enhacement you want. In the meantime someone give us a plugin to import the poser hair into Cinema 4D, you can use this process to export your hair from Poser 5 to C4D. It's not a perfect and "clean" system but it works. The image above took me aprox. 2 hours to setup and aprox. 20 minutes to render and it was my 3rd try.

This tutorial may seem too long but it's really short. Have patience a read carefully, once you follow the process you'll be able to do it by memory. The key of success is experimentation. I hope this information is usefull to you.

The first step is to setup the hair you want to export. For this example use the Neftis Classica hair. The model is Stephanie but you can use any other female you want.

Pose your model etc.

Once you have placed the hair in your scene, adjust the scale and the position so it fits better the head. It doesn't have to be perfect because we'll adjust the skull cap later in C4D, just some adjustments so this'll save work later.

In the hair setup room adjust all the hair groups so they have 10 vertex per hair. this is very important, all the groups should have the same number of vertex.

You can use more vertex if your hair is curly but it'll make your machine suffer because it'll require more memory. You can put some less vertex, but we'll have to delete the tip vertex of every hair in C4D (reason explained later) and if in this case we'll get a 10% hair shorter if you use only 5 vertex per hair you'll get a 20% shorter hair.

Now let's export the parts of our scene. For the example I'll make it difficult by exporting every hair group as an individual obj. With this you'll get more control of your hair later and by doing the process three times in this case, you'll learn by memory how to do this.

But you can export the hair as a whole if you wish.

Export as wavefront obj (lwo if you don't get morphloader from some friend). In the hierarchy selection deselect the Figure 1 (or any other name the lady or lad has), and select the SkullcapFem_1 and the first group of hair (Hair_1) as shown below. The settings are the default export settings.

Repeat the same with the other two hair groups and then with the female model.

You can only export the "guides" of the Poser 5 hair, so, if you want more guides you'll have to subdivide your skullcap in another program, but this will only work when you start a whole new hairstyle (12/10/03).

Now, in C4D run the MorphLoader plugin by Peter Georg S.** ( http://www.c4d.de in downloads-plugins-import/export). It has to be this plugin because it mantains the correct vertex order (sorry, link is down and haven't found another source. Maybe you could ask for information in some forum 12/10/03).

Locate your first file and type the import factor (This has to be the same than your import settings in Cinema for the obj format because we'll import the female model with another plugin. I use 999 because is the maxium number I can type.

* The author does not take responsability for the use anyone gives to this information.