Hairfarm Vray Antialiasing tips

[davision]

I am trying to render some hair with Vray using the VrayHairFarmMod. I've had difficulties with aa in the past so I'm just doing a simple test.

I have a very basic lighting set up for testing (just a spherical vray light) since I'm trying to eliminate complex lighting as a cause of noise for this test. The material is also generic -- just a matte vray material to eliminate material issues. Even with such simplicity, I am getting rough AA along the hair strands. It looks almost like moire but not quite. Just very dirty overall.

Can anyone recommend particular antialiasing settings for getting hair to look very smooth?

[davision]

An addendum: I am having similar issues with ornatrix so it's not specific to the hair plugin -- I just want advice on how to handle hair rendering in general to achieve optimal crisp quality. The native renderers of Hairfarm and Ornatrix create nice smooth hair so I'm hoping to get a similar look with Vray.

[vlado]

You would typically use some transparency mapping for the hairs - a VRayHairInfoTex works well - and avoid using tapering for the hairs widths. In one of the next versions of V-Ray we will add automatic transparency based on the strand width too in order to make the job of the image sampler easier. Next, you need lots of max AA samples - minimum of 8 subdivs, but typically more - to get a smooth result. Finally, the AA filter is important - a softer filter typically works better.

Best regards,
Vlado

[davision]

Many thanks Vlado. I'll give it a go.

Is the new auto transparency feature coming in SP1? Or is it further down the line?

[vlado]

Is the new auto transparency feature coming in SP1? Or is it further down the line?

It's coming a bit further on - it's not ready yet.

Best regards,
Vlado