As the poll posted by Vlado here ( http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20929 )
shows, most of you prefer to have either a built-in hair modeler in Vray or integration with the included in 3dsMax Shave’n’Haircut. That is quite understandable. What will Vray developers decide about it is up to them.
What concerns me as a developer of hair modeling products (Hairtrix and possible successors) is whether existing Hairtrix users (if there’s any of them ) would like to have export to Vray Fur primitives (similar to the export to mental ray hair primitives).
In fact, I have implemented such export about a year ago, but it remained only as an internal test, both because Hairtrix was not released yet and because the results were not good enough (again, similar to the export to mental ray hair primitives). Even now my simple tests show that rendering hair exported to Vray Fur is not just much slower than the Hairtrix atmospheric renderer (which is normal), but also slower than geometry export as 6-sided cylinders.
So, I’d like to know if anyone is interested in such export, and if yes, if he’s interested in beta testing it. I have no experience at all with Vray and maybe I’m not doing something right, or just can’t see the benefits of Vray Fur export. Or maybe there is no such benefit indeed, and there is no point to add this feature to Hairtrix.
ivan,
There doesnt seem to be much information about hairtrix.
There is some info on turbosquid but nothing in depth.
I would be very interested in the vray fur primitives as Im using furhair for a few major landscaping animation projects.
Current users of hairfx may upgrade to Hairtrix for $150. Users of Ornatrix may upgrade to Hairtrix for $250. Hairtrix is available from Turbo Squid at …
From what I’ve heard from others they have the same problems with VRay fur that you describe (in that it renders very slowly). If it wasn’t for the bad performance it would be really cool if Vray fur was supported.
I havent used Renderman yet but I hear that it’s spline/hair rendering speed absolutely screams. Maybe Vlado want’s to comment on that?
Fur, displacement and proxies will usually render much faster if you increase the dynamic memory amount from the default 400mb to something around 2GB.
if a character is rendered in GI then compositing fur not rendered in GI over it would seem to be pointless. if haitrix can give us fast dynamic hair with GI then im all for it
Providing info about the product is up to the publisher, Turbo Squid. The info about Hairtrix is just the same as it was for the predecessor, hairfx, which I agree is not very much. I’m not sure what is their policy of providing demos, but I think they do provide demos to any serious users. The only detail is that you should contact them either by phone or through the support system on their website, not by e-mail - their spam filter is too harsh.
As for hair and GI - I can’t tell how useful it can be to compose non-GI hair over a GI-character. If we assume that it can be useful, then the built-in renderers in Hairtrix can do the best non-GI-hair-rendering job you can find anywhere.
If we assume that we absolutely need GI for hair, then you won’t find a hair-modeling product which includes a GI renderer, because that’s a huge task which takes a separate product, such as V-Ray. That’s why we have decided not to develop the renderers built in Hairtrix further, but to look for integration with established renderers. So far our experience with that has been poor. No renderer we’ve tried provides useful GI rendering of hair (we haven’t tried Renderman). We are ready to do our best to convert Hairtrix hair to any external renderer, once the renderer has developed a well-established API or interchange format and proved that it can produce decent results. mental ray provides a solid and simple API for hair import, that’s why it is easy to write exporters to it. But as I said, we haven’t yet seen any decent results produced neither with MR, nor with any other GI renderer.
shame that haitrix has stalled. It seemed to hold a lot of promise. I’ve used max hair (shave and haircut) in geometry mode and its damn slow and the hair looks like wire. Nothing else seems to work. Vray fur has only recently had a tapered option, but it too looks too solid to represent hair it requires a lot of work with a paintbrush to fix it. Those test renders looked great, the hair was a little thin for grass and but a cool effect none-the less. How does the styling interface work? I liked the one in max hair, but doing multipass renders between 2 different rendering engines with different materials is a PITA.
Raj
looks like I can get proper GI and shadows underneath my hair with a vraysun…
and I am finally giving my characters proper hair in 1 pass without complicated methods…
looks like a very good solution compared to the hair of max which is useless (in my testings)…try to render animations with max hair and your shadows will flicker hurting your eyes and you need multiple light sources composing shadows and what not
Renderman gets an easy time of it since it uses so much lazy loading where geometry is only loaded in when it’s need to render a bucket and then it drops immediately afterwards. Also of major note is the fact that if you want to get this really fast pace from renderman then you can’t do any kind of raytracing. As soon as you do that then the geometry in one bucket might reflect something in another bucket which is where all of the speed and memory advantages die off. If you had lots of raytraced shadows on hair or GI then you could have rays that end up bouncing over nearly every portion of the screen so you’d need to have the lot loaded into memory to calculate. It’s the same reason the hair FX buffered render is so quick - it’s not doing any complex raytracing or interaction with all the other objects in the scene so it doesn’t have to obey the same rendering rules. Admittedly you lose the convenience of one lighting setup working across everything and having a solid connection between hair and source object but you gain back in the speed.
So, you mean that this vraysun light casts proper GI illumination on hair, and casts shadows? That’s good. Which environment renderer did you use? (there are three of them, one provided by hairfx and two by Ornatrix)
Actually, finalRender has a simple approach to GI for such “externally rendered” objects like hair - it provides two special lights, one for GI and one for caustics (I think), which simulate the GI illumination in a specified point when asked to. So the hairfx renderer gets access to these lights and receives *some* GI illumination, probably not perfect as it would be when calculated strand by strand using geometry, but fast and enough for most cases.
) would like to have export to Vray Fur primitives (similar to the export to mental ray hair primitives).