10 steps to grow eyebrows in the Poser 11 Hair Room:
1. Ensure Poser’s units are set to “Feet” in the main Preferences.
2. Enter the Hair Room. Select “Figure” | “Head”.
3. Press “New Growth Group” button. Accept its default name.
4. “Edit Growth Group” button. The character goes a funny colour. Selection buttons: “+” and “Draw”…
5. Now use the Pencil to draw on the skin of the character’s head. Where you draw is where the hairs will grow from…
draw.jpg
The reverse on the panel, the “minus” button, is extremely clunky to use. It also appears not to work at all once hair is grown, and so it’s best to get the placing right the first time!
Close the panel.
6. “Grow Guide Hairs”. Adjust Hair Length to something like 0.1 and Length Variance to 0.01. Don’t worry that the hairs are still long and floppy at this stage…
7. Put Hair Density up to 14000 (28 guide hairs, for 14000 hairs) and Tip Width to 0.8. Tick “Show Populated” to get a thicker real-time preview of the hair.
8. Now click “Style Hairs”. This is the bit where the Hair Room becomes somewhat un-intuitive.
First you click the highlighted selector button on the styling panel. Then you click-and-drag a box across the hair to select it all. This turns the tips of the selected hair into a yellow square. If this is done, the other buttons on the panel can be selected.
light.jpg
Now you can click the “Scale” button, and turn the dial wildly to the left again and again in order to make your long strands much shorter. Exit the Styling panel.
9. Now move over to the “Calculate Dynamics” panel. First set Gravity to 1.0 for eyebrows (default is -10, meant for flopping head-hair). Click “Calculate Dynamics” and physics is applied to the hair (it’s similar to dForce in DAZ). If that’s not enough try perhaps 3.0, for a more upward sweep on the eyebrows.
10. Done. Parent the brows to the head and “inherit bends of parent”. Not bad for a first try…
And, as you can see, they show up in the real-time Comic Book Preview, including inks-only. This is, after all, why such strand-based eyebrows are needed…
However, their inking is not controllable by the Multiplier dial…
This is, however, actually a useful feature. As you don’t want your fine eyebrows inking locked to the thickness of your other edge lines.
The only problem is that, while parenting to the head works, it does not allow the brows to move to new positions when new expressions are applied to the face. Even growing the hairs on the eyebrows material (not ideal in terms of hair distribution) doesn’t manage to get them to move in sync with the facial expressions. I guess this is why strand hair uses invisible skull caps and the like.
In practice, the above is an interesting tech-demo useful for one-off stills. But it’s not ideal for a comics character who needs many facial expressions applied. It may be better to omit brows entirely and ink them in by hand and in a slightly stylised and ‘graphic’ way, for maximum expressiveness.