V-Ray Future Hair/Fur Plans?

[waaazoo]

i will try the build just before

[waaazoo]

with this one everything works:
vray_adv_15000_maya2010_x64_10624

[vladimir.nedev]

Something must have gone wrong during the install, these two builds have almost no changes between them, certainly nothing connected to Maya hair.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[waaazoo]

Maybe... I'll try that again.

I'm pretty satisfied with the results for now...

[shadevfx]

great test, Ive been playing with VRfur a bit today. Can you tell me a bit more about your setup? What sort of shader you are using, how many hairs, and how long it took to render?

This is in reference to the cougar test...

We have an upcoming project with fur and are trying to evaluate weather to try vray fur or stick with renderman.

[waaazoo]

Hello Shadevfx. I have no time right now, but PM me your email i could send you the scene, or a part of it.

[snivlem]

Autodesk have just confirmed there is no way to access Maya fur

This is a fascinating response from Autodesk. I wonder how mental images is able to access it and if they are simulating it's behaviour.

[vlado]

I suppose they have coded a shader that emulates the way Maya fur works. It is easy for Autodesk, since they have the original code, but we would have to go through a lot of trial and error to figure out how to do that. This is the same situation as with procedural textures.

Best regards,
Vlado

[snivlem]

I see. Thanks Vlado for clarifying that point.

[waaazoo]

I'm a bit lost. Where does exactly Vray take shading parameters from Maya hair. I now have a scene where i can't find any way to control color of hair ???!!!

[vladimir.nedev]

The hair color is taken from the hairSystem "Shading" section. All parameters there should be properly accounted for in V-Ray except for the "translucence" as I couldn't figure out what this does. Now that I think about it the "Casts shadows" parameter wouldn't work as well. That will be easy to fix though.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[waaazoo]

yes it works, but it was totally broken in an earlier scene.
Does it take also the settings from "hair color scale" and "color randomization" ?

regards,

[vladimir.nedev]

Yes, those values should be taken into account as well. The Maya API just gives us the final color for each hair strand vertex, based on all these attributes, so we don't have to try to replicate the Maya behavior.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[waaazoo]

Ah, i see. Wouldn't it be possible to have a shader that uses this out color but with more Vrayish parameters ? That would give us a superb shading possibility for hair ?!
I find in particular that the specular shading is not so usable...

[vladimir.nedev]

It could be done in principle, but it won't be a Maya shader since neither paint effects nor hair systems can be assigned to shading groups. If you try, you'll get an error like 'Cannot add the following items to the set since the set has restrictions on membership: pfxHairShape1". So these V-Ray attributes have to be either dynamic attributes or an object set similar to VRayObjectProperties, they won't be part of a shader.

Also the specular component for hair shading is computed by a special reflection model to give it the appearance of hair. We use that right now. Even if we do right another shader it will use the same reflection mode anyway. Can you show me an example of the problems you're having with the specular component ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev