shag and Vray combo....

[grassynoel]

What's the best way to combine Vray and shag? I want to keep shag as an atmospheric as Vray doesn't seem to AA the shag too well when in geometry mode. I can't make a composite vray/shag shadow map and find the shag/shadow map combo not very workable (max bombs out a bit)

Any advice from anyone who has cracked this nut would be appreciated.

Glenn Melenhorst
Iloura.

[stefan]

Last time I was playing with it I ended up rendering the hair out as a sepparate pass with the scanliner and it´s own set of lights and matte shadow objects where needed (to fake the GI look we achieved in the previous pass done with vray), and comped it all together later.

Hopefully, with vray 1.1 and it´s capability to render any number of poly´s it will be possible to render any ammount of geometry hair with GI, without the need to composite it later. I find the Mental ray approach of hair primitives much more elegant though, but as far as I know render primitives have not been exposed to the user yet with the current implementation of Mental Ray in Max6. The same is uinfortunately true for the Mental Ray Hair shader. Currently, as far as I know, there is no way to export custom Mental Ray data with your scene at render time (maybe I´m wrong?), but it might be possible to write a script that calculates the mental ray hair table and appends the MI file before rendering.

Stefan

[richard_rosenman]

Hi Glenn,

I recently did a job with Shag and VRay:

http://www.richardrosenman.com/infosection.htm

My personal thoughts on fur are the following.

I NEVER use volumetric hair because it looks terrible and it can't be lit properly. In my opinion, geometric hair is the only way to go if you want to light it properly (well).

Needless to say, geometric hair takes a serious hit on memory so I hit my limit soon enough. Despite this, I was still able to get much looking (albeit thinner) hair, than using the volumetric method.

Otherwise, I think Shag is absolutely awesome. It's extremely flexible (to the point that at first the ridiculous number of options may be daunting...) but I soon found myself requiring to do this or do that and for every requirement, there was a solution.

Rendering with GI doesn't pose to be much of a problem - it will take a little longer as you will probably guess since there is a lot of fine geometry for the samples to deal with.

Aliasing IS a problem, so you must use high values. I can't remember what I used for my renders but I also rendered at 2400x1600 and then bicubicly scaled down which GREATLY reduces jaggies. If I were rendering at normal broadcast res, I would imagine I'd have to crank it to something ridiculous such as 2,4 or higher.

Anyways, I hope this info helps. You guys do great work, by the way.

-Richard

[DP]

wow...i use 2/4 all the time...

has anyone found an equivalent of that in adaptive?