hairfx workflow

[DaForce]

yeah... thats kinda max's trademark.. most things work well but there are lots of little annoying things that can ruin the whole experience sometimes.. LOL

Ahh well one day we will have a suitable large area grass solution, and in the mean time we just have to lump it

hmmm viewport seems similar to me... maybe its just you

[Adam H. Stewart]

3ds 9

I wonder what tools they are working on for 9 ? I went to a sneak peak at E3 last year, where they showed me basically what was coming in 8 - now they have Maya in the fold I wonder will they be borrowing any features ? or will it all about be intergration !!

[DaForce]

Mmmm good points.. i sure would love a paintfx type of thing for max.. like they have in maya
Trees and grass at the swing of a mouse

[voltron7]

This was a few PArrays as grass - max8sp1 rvay adv 14703
just a grass test




small diffuse glow in ps





bofore ps
http://ec3dzone.com.istemp.com/MP7%20copy-a.jpg
http://ec3dzone.com.istemp.com/MP7%20copy.jpg

small diffuse glow in ps

[mike.edel]

Mmmm good points.. i sure would love a paintfx type of thing for max.. like they have in maya
Trees and grass at the swing of a mouse

it's a post render effect though, so it probably wouldnt work with vray in that case
also it used to be extremely slow and shaky in the first versions of maya that used it

[Gonzaga]

IF you run into memory or time issues you can always render the grass with scanline and composite it later ... with HairFX that works not too bad ...

Greetings ... Andreas.

[joconnell]

You get a lot of problems with the motion blur though - If you are using vray motion blur you need to change the bias on the camera settings or else your scanline hair won't line up with the vray render.

[Gonzaga]

Could you tell us a bit more about that bias settings in detail ... now as you mention it I remember having ha d a hard time to get rid of some motion blur problems with HairFX grass long ago ... in which way do you have to apply these settings?

That would be great ...

Greetings ... Andreas.

[joconnell]

Heya Andreas,

I had a problem with this recently - I was doing a camera panning left to right on to a cartoon lion. the main scene and the lion was rendered with vray and 3d motion blur. The fur and the mane of the lion was rendered using hairfx in the scanline and used matte shadow materials so I could lay it on top of the vray render.

The problem is to do with how the motion blur is calculated. If you render with the scanline and use image motion blur, the image is rendered first and then a smudge blur is applied. With vray, the default motion blur setting will take into account the position of objects between frames. This means that if you are rendering frame 1 of an animation, the scanline renders frame 1 and then blurs it - the motion blur is centred around frame 1. Vray however takes into account the fact that the object is moving between frames 1 and 2 and using the default setting, it's as if you were rendering frame 1.5 rather than just frame 1. The vray camera blur centers itself between frames.

Here's a picture to show this:



As you can see, the position of the sphere is the same in the scanline and vray with no blur. When we apply blur though, the scanline render seems to keep the same position for the object and just apply a smudge. With vray though, it takes into account that the object is moving between frames when it is doing its blur sampling and so the object is in a slightly different position. If we want to get it to be close to the scanline (you have to it this way since the scanline doesnt have controls to change this) there is a property called interval center in the camera motion blur settings in the vray render dialog. To mimic the scanline blur, set this to 0 so that the blur is applied near the start of the frame rather than the middle. You can see in the last vray image the position of the object is closer to the scanline render. You'll still have to play with the durations of the scanline and vray blurs though to make them look similar.

Hope this helps

[Gonzaga]

GREAT!!!

That's some nice little example and I'm sure a lot of people will find this helpful including me.

I hope we haven't left the initial topic here too far ...

Thanks for the posting ... good work ...

Greetings ... Andreas.

[joconnell]

Actually I had this problem myself earlier on - I'll write a slightly better tutorial on it this evening with a few more examples.

[Gonzaga]

Great ... I'm looking forward to that ...

Greetings ... Andreas.