Haircard shader ?

[nicolas_fuminier]

I still use composite node everywhere in all our production for more than 15 years now. I didn't know at all it has a terrible memory management (is it true also for VrayGPU ^Lele^ ?)
I find the ergonomic design much more friendly. No mention to the mask node who could rule them all. I totally understand that a mask is just another multiplication for greyscale mask but VrayCompText can't triger the opacity / alpha slot in the texture as de Composite map node does.
For a quick alpha map mask light, it's clearly much much more user friendly.
I might, of course, use everything in a wrong way, but I take every information possible as I use those node everyday, in every production in ton of lights (ad I tell my team to use it aswell in the same way)




Nicolas

[Vizioen]

Yeah I guess performance isn't exactly kept in mind when you're overlaying a couple of vraybitmaps with stochastic tiling enabled in their respective uvwrandomizers.

[^Lele^]

The issue is a compounding one, so for small setups it's negligible.
Waiting one hour for 50 big-sized EXRs to load from a busy network each time the material editor opens (or the material/map is edited) is where the issue lies.

[Vizioen]

Ah well, everything is stored on NVME SSDs so I can't complain then.

[^Lele^]

Consider that if you used only vrayBitmap, the issue wouldn't even be *that* bad, both for memory and speed, as only a tiny mip level would be loaded for the material editor.
That hour-per-load map became a 10 seconds affair after conversion to vrayHDRI (as it was called at the time.) and tiled textures.