Rendering hair from shave and haircut

[Bertjenkins]

Hi folks, Since i have given up on xgen (too buggy) i have tried to use shave and haircut for a hair project. Seems to be a little easier to use, but there seems to be little or no documentation on how to set up your finished hair for rendering in vray. Can anyone point me to a tutorial or quickly explain? So far i am using a vray material override on the initial shading group but the results seem a bit weird. I have got some reasonable renders but really i am stabbing in the dark....

i'm fine with render settings and hair mtl 3 etc, i just want to know the best way to send the shave node to vray... or to export the geometry? Whatever is the best workflow.

thanks in advance!

[Morbid Angel]

when you create shave it should place pre render call backs into your pre-render mel window (in render globals) it should work with vray, not sure if its supported by latest vray you should find out from shave what is their latest version.

For shading shave, you actually (if i remember correctly) need to connect the hair mtl to shave node / override mtl, i don;t think it accepts direct shader assignment. I would honestly suggest to use yeti (unless you are in states of course)

[Bertjenkins]

Great thanks, i thought it seemed strange that there was no connection to the shader, I will investigate. Yes and I have heard good things about yeti. However is it good for long hair?

[Morbid Angel]

Great thanks, i thought it seemed strange that there was no connection to the shader, I will investigate. Yes and I have heard good things about yeti. However is it good for long hair?

yeti is like any other hair plugin. Like shave, it uses guides to control the hair strands. Whats important about yeti is that it connects with vray very well. You can assign shader directly to hair, and control the hair very easily, though its not the easiest to learn in the beginning being all procedural.

Depending on what you need to do, you can use yeti if you make your own hair guide curves, or you might have some luck using nHair in maya its not the best but actually better for long hair I find.

[Bertjenkins]

Just out of interest does anyone know how to connect the hair mtl shader to the shave node?

[vlado]

Just out of interest does anyone know how to connect the hair mtl shader to the shave node?

You need to assign it to the viewport display node and then there is a checkbox somewhere to override the shader that you need to turn off.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Bertjenkins]

thanks, i know the override checkbox.... will give that a go.