Instances vs Fur

[scorpes]

I'm trying to create realistic animal fur, but I have problems to get the fur more realistic. So I made a test with deformed instanced cylinders (left) and a test with regular fur (right) and I am amazed by the quality difference. The individual strands look so much better on the instanced fur. I'am just using default lambert with sun/sky setup for both. It's like the fur strands do not have individual shading. Did I miss a quality slider/button on the fur?

Best Regards,

Robbert

[vlado]

You are correct that the strands of fur do not have individual shading because those strands are typically less than 1 pixel wide and any individual shading is lost in practice. This works together with the V-Ray hair material, which simulates scattering from thin translucent cylinders. Getting the same results from actual cylindrical geometry would be much slower.

Best regards,
Vlado

[scorpes]

Oke good to know. Would be nice to have a option or flag to turn on "expensive shading" for fur. Because in our results the instances work better for close-up shots. But it's a lot of work to update our yeti and shader graph in a complicated setups to work with instances, would be nice to keep it like fur but have an "expensive slow shading" button.