Speed up vrayfur with GI?

[joconnell]

Hi Folks,

I'm working on my first christmas ad of the year (dear god) and I'm making a tree using vray fur which is giving me very nice results - the only thing is that I've gotten quicker render times with plain old mesh and I'm thinking that it might be a better way to go when baking GI for flythroughs. I've gotten decent results with particles using bent cylinders as needles but the "fall" of the fur is much nicer and something hard to get with pflow. Is there any way to convert fur to mesh or get any kind of information from it using maxscript? Ideally something like being able to get a matrix of each fur primitive?

I'm very concious of speed just at the minute, I'm in an XSI based company and their render farm is exclusively mental ray - I'll be putting render copies of max and vray on there but since my deadline is rather short and time for mistakes limited it'd be great to go for the dumb but guaranteed option.

Cheers!

(P.s. will post the christmas tree in a bit in case anyone wants it)

[rdg]

Merry christmas!
I want the tree!

Cheers,

Georg

[vlado]

Re: Speed up vrayfur with GI?

Hi Folks,

I'm working on my first christmas ad of the year (dear god) and I'm making a tree using vray fur which is giving me very nice results - the only thing is that I've gotten quicker render times with plain old mesh and I'm thinking that it might be a better way to go when baking GI for flythroughs. I've gotten decent results with particles using bent cylinders as needles but the "fall" of the fur is much nicer and something hard to get with pflow. Is there any way to convert fur to mesh or get any kind of information from it using maxscript? Ideally something like being able to get a matrix of each fur primitive?

What kind of GI are you using? A blurred light cache or plain old QMC GI may be a better option than the irradiance map.

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

Yeah using irmap and lc at the moment since there aren't any moving objects - In one shot the tree lights up though so i'll have to go for qmc there. Just curious if vray fur gets calculated every frame in an adaptive way like vray displacement? Would there be any reason why fur would cause problems with saved irmaps and light cache?

[vlado]

Yeah using irmap and lc at the moment since there aren't any moving objects - In one shot the tree lights up though so i'll have to go for qmc there. Just curious if vray fur gets calculated every frame in an adaptive way like vray displacement?

The fur placement is not view-dependent, if this is what you mean.

Would there be any reason why fur would cause problems with saved irmaps and light cache?

There shouldn't be problems, but it may take some RAM.

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

By adaptive I mean that it's mesh would change in quality as the camera got closer which may have cause problems but this doesnt seem to be the case - thanks for the clarifications.

[rdg]

using irmap and lc at the moment since there aren't any moving objects - In one shot the tree lights up though so i'll have to go for qmc there.

so it is possible to change the solution between differrent shot and keep the overall look?

Georg