shave + vrayHairMtl3 + color maps

[sharktacos]

Last I checked it was possible to render Shave hair in geo mode using the vrayHairMtl3.

The only downsides to this were:

1) it was not possible to apply a color map to the material based on the UV of the geo the hair was generated from (like you can with the default Shave material).

2) there was no way to add a vray materialID to the vrayHairMtl3

Have either of these been updated in a stable build?

thanks!

[vlado]

I think the material ID issue should work fine in the nightly builds; I'm not sure about the UVs - this would be something that needs to be handled in the Shave shader for V-Ray; I'll check it out.

Best regards,
Vlado

[sharktacos]

I'm not sure about the UVs - this would be something that needs to be handled in the Shave shader for V-Ray; I'll check it out.

To clarify: UV maps work fine when using the native Shave shader and Vray. What does not work is rendering the Shave hair in geo mode with the VrayHairMtl3. This does not currently (Vray 2.2) take color info from the base geo UVs as it should. So you can only make single colored hair, but can't use it to make a zebra or a tiger for example.

[sharktacos]

Here's an idea: If there was a VrayShaveSampler node we could get the UV color info into a VrayHairMtl3 the same way we do with Maya hair using the VrayHairSampler.

[vlado]

Here are some samples for rendering Shave hair with the V-Ray hair shader (Maya 2012):
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/scenes/shave_uvs_sample.zip

In the hairsampler.ma file, I just use the VRayHairSampler node to take the Shave color and transparency and plug them into the V-Ray hair material. This approach only allows three colors of the hair material to be controlled though (the VRayHairSampler node can only read the color, transparency and incandescence attributes of the hair).

The ramp_uvw.ma sample uses the Shave colors as UV coordinates to drive other textures. This approach allows you to map more properties of the hair material, and also to use V-Ray procedural textures.



Best regards,
Vlado

[sharktacos]

Thanks for posting this Vlado, I look forward to taking a look! We'll need to upgrade to Shave 7.0 first. I'll put our systems guys on it.