VRAY and HAIR and FUR

[mik]

I tried to do some rendering with vray and the new hair modifier from 3dsmax 8 base on the shave and haircut technology and I had no result my vray crash everytime!!

So I do a search around the net and see this post from Joe alter (the creator of Shave and Haircut) about a question fo mental ray

this is a post from the cgsociety forum :

Originally Posted by Ls3D
Well I just rendered a scene with HDRI lighting & FG, but since HAIR is implemented as an EFFECT, it is apparently not a part of the GI calcuation. Afraid geometry is the only way I know of right now

and here its answer

yes, [HDRI/GI/Etc] you can do it with geo hair, and you can also do it with the MR shader - as for the max render and 3rd party renders, we have a GI listener callback as part of the sdk - simple matter for 3rd partys to insert their own shading contribution there - I'm sure we'll see some takers soon.

Finally I would like to know if you plan to implement this feature in your futur release.

thanks a lot for your work

ps: sorry for my english

Mickael attia
Senior 3D artist
DURAN

[Da_elf]

this is definately something they should do

[vlado]

This possibility may be exposed by the generic hair & fur API by Joe Alter, but that API does not come with the 3dsmax SDK. I believe that no part of the 3dsmax Hair&Fur implementation is exposed to 3rd party renderers at the moment.

Best regards,
Vlado

[gafl]

Bad news !

[DaForce]

Is there no way to turn the hair to geometry at rendertime?
That was the fix for the other hair plugins... sure its not the ideal way but it did work.

[skogskalle]

yes you can turn it into geometry at rendertime, and that works if you dont have too much hair/fur. if you have too many hairstrands it seems to crash MAX even if you use the dynamic memory option in Vray.I tried to make a large field of tall grass recently using hair and fur, and the only solution i found to make it render was to convert the grass into geometry, (many many many polys) and then export it as a vray proxy. ofcourse this wont work if you need to animate your hair...

[DaForce]

Yeah, the poly counts is the main problem

Hopefully there will be a fix.
There used to be a plugin for ornatrix hair that made it render properly with vray... dont know if they still have it tho.
But its a problem with all hair plugins and vray.

[tom schuelke]

Well couldnt be there a way vlado, just to turn the hair to a vrayproxy automatically, after rendercall and only temporarily ? couldnt this solve the problem ? shave and haircut with vray also is high on my wishlist.

While vray furr is realy nice, the use of s&H is much much more intuitive to get the desired results, and also the dynamic is a great feature.


Tom

[joconnell]

Just as an aside, I used hairfx in geometry mode for a set of ads recently and one thing that made vray crash all the time was trying to motion blur splines that were adaptive and thus kept changing their vertex count - make sure shave keeps everything locked to a certain point count to avoid all of this and turn off adaptive for any splines involved with shave. I havent bothered installing max 8 yet cos of all the problems I've heard and afterburn / dreamscape aint out for it yet so this mightnt be an issue.

[trixian]

As for geometry hair.....

Wouldnt it be just as good if the max (Joe Alter) hair spat out each strand as a hair primitive? like Ornatrix is supposedly doing with its vray thingy? Or is this just the same as using geometry hair in any case?