gradient ramp for vrayfur thickness map

I remember vlado fur tut using a gradientramp for vrayfur thickness. couldn´t find the tread and doesn´t get it working either, maybe some z-axis-upping-problem i can´t remember… anybody knows the trick?
Matthias

I was using a gradient texture to map the opacity of the strands, not the thickness as such (although mapping the opacity gives the illusion of changed thickness).

Best regards,
Vlado

yepp, i knew there was something different …

another fur struggling - even when excluding the fur from gi completely (visible to , receive, get gi) it still slows down the lightcache massively - am i missing something?
Matthias

I noticed this too in the last animation I did. Even calc’d the LC and IRMAP with the fur hidden, it’s GI disabled, and included lights to illuminate it in the render pass. When I tried to render, buckets kicked in and would just hang. Never produced a pixel. Ended up compositing the fur instead.

Any explanation of solution would be great!

Thanks,
Shaun

what is your base mesh?
Can you show a picture?
As the fur is a dynamic object, it’ll subdivide the base mesh when calculating where to place strands- if for example your trying to do a carpet and you’ve used one big plane 1x1 subdiv, you’ll run into problems as there aren’t enough sections. Make sure the plane would be something like 15x15 width/hight and it’ll work better.

base mesh is more or less a ground plane 200x200 meters, subdivided to 1m faces, slightly noising, no animation…