VRAY and HAIR and FUR

I tried to do some rendering with vray and the new hair modifier from 3dsmax 8 base on the shave and haircut technology and I had no result my vray crash everytime!!

So I do a search around the net and see this post from Joe alter (the creator of Shave and Haircut) about a question fo mental ray

this is a post from the cgsociety forum :

Originally Posted by Ls3D
Well I just rendered a scene with HDRI lighting & FG, but since HAIR is implemented as an EFFECT, it is apparently not a part of the GI calcuation. Afraid geometry is the only way I know of right now

and here its answer

yes, [HDRI/GI/Etc] you can do it with geo hair, and you can also do it with the MR shader - as for the max render and 3rd party renders, we have a GI listener callback as part of the sdk - simple matter for 3rd partys to insert their own shading contribution there - I’m sure we’ll see some takers soon.

Finally I would like to know if you plan to implement this feature in your futur release.

thanks a lot for your work

ps: sorry for my english

Mickael attia
Senior 3D artist
DURAN

this is definately something they should do

This possibility may be exposed by the generic hair & fur API by Joe Alter, but that API does not come with the 3dsmax SDK. I believe that no part of the 3dsmax Hair&Fur implementation is exposed to 3rd party renderers at the moment.

Best regards,
Vlado

:frowning:
Bad news !

Is there no way to turn the hair to geometry at rendertime?
That was the fix for the other hair plugins… sure its not the ideal way but it did work.

yes you can turn it into geometry at rendertime, and that works if you dont have too much hair/fur. if you have too many hairstrands it seems to crash MAX even if you use the dynamic memory option in Vray.I tried to make a large field of tall grass recently using hair and fur, and the only solution i found to make it render was to convert the grass into geometry, (many many many polys) and then export it as a vray proxy. ofcourse this wont work if you need to animate your hair…

Yeah, the poly counts is the main problem :frowning:

Hopefully there will be a fix.
There used to be a plugin for ornatrix hair that made it render properly with vray… dont know if they still have it tho.
But its a problem with all hair plugins and vray.

Well couldnt be there a way vlado, just to turn the hair to a vrayproxy automatically, after rendercall and only temporarily ? couldnt this solve the problem ? shave and haircut with vray also is high on my wishlist.

While vray furr is realy nice, the use of s&H is much much more intuitive to get the desired results, and also the dynamic is a great feature.

Tom

Just as an aside, I used hairfx in geometry mode for a set of ads recently and one thing that made vray crash all the time was trying to motion blur splines that were adaptive and thus kept changing their vertex count - make sure shave keeps everything locked to a certain point count to avoid all of this and turn off adaptive for any splines involved with shave. I havent bothered installing max 8 yet cos of all the problems I’ve heard and afterburn / dreamscape aint out for it yet so this mightnt be an issue.

As for geometry hair…

Wouldnt it be just as good if the max (Joe Alter) hair spat out each strand as a hair primitive? like Ornatrix is supposedly doing with its vray thingy? Or is this just the same as using geometry hair in any case?