Rendering Soft Fur

[rich_hornet]

Hey Guys,

I am currently working on a project that needs soft looking fur. What would be the best approach to achieve this with Vray?

Here is a reference image client gave us.



Thank you

Richard Kim

[Donfarese]

Very fine hairs, Set the thickness very low, you will need many more hairs so it will probably take longer to render.

[Morbid Angel]

I think thin hairs is one way of doing it. But you will need A LOT of fur, which is normal on any animal, but may be a killer for your workstation to handle. Another trick is to use gradient mapped transparency along strand length, it will make the fur look a lot softer with less hairs but the render time will be x4

These days with fur, you have 2 options: 1 - use a raytracer, and live with the things mentioned above. 2 - use render man and deep shadows, fast, efficient, but render man is render man

[rich_hornet]

Hey Guys,

Thank you so much for your input. I think we are going to go with the lots of fine hair approach.

Thanks again

Richard Kim

[Zach Gray]

Soft fur settings

We are running into the same issue. The attached image renders in about 10mins, and we would like to keep it below 30 for the fur. Is there a way to make each strand look thicker and softer without creating a clump of 30 tiny hairs?

Like in zootoopia...


The base texture is just flat color at this point. We'll paint a full map with more color variation.

Thank

[Morbid Angel]

I would guess that the render in zootopia is not vray? That fur does not look that soft. With your render, and a raytracer in general which uses real calculation there isn't really any trick to faking the soft look. Using embree does speed up the render of hair quite a bit.

What you need is to produce several layers of fur, short fur, longer less dense fur coat. It will help with giving it a more softer look.

Regarding the render time, I really doubt you can keep it low, as hair is hair, and sampling hair with a raytracer is a tedious task.

[vlado]

To make the fur softer, you'll need to give the material a bit of transparency - either on the strands as a whole, or only toward the tips.

Best regards,
Vlado