Maya HAIR Raytracing

[Duncan]

First you might try lowering the sub segments on the hairSystem. This is the simplest way to
reduce the geometry count resulting from pfxToPoly, although one can get nickled edges.

If the reflections don't need very high quality on the hair for the reflections, you could try using a reduced system just for the reflections: fatter and fewer hairs, lower sub samples.

Note that one can use pfx for the primary hair by turning off primary visibility on the pfxToPoly mesh and then making the pfxHair node visible.

Another approach is to render cubic environment maps. Render 6 square axis aligned 90 degree views from the general position of your reflecting objects, hiding the reflecting objects or making them single sided to avoid them blocking the view. Construct a cubic environment and use this instead of true reflections. This has the advantage that one can also do blurry reflections if desired.

Another approach for crude reflections is to loft a surface through the out hair curves along the overall boundary of the hair mass(you need output nurbs curves for this.. it is possible to connect some up by hand after the hair system has been created, although it requires a bit of knowhow). This lofted surface would have primary visibility off and assigned a shader that roughly matches the look of the hair.


Duncan

[snikt]

Thanks Duncan.

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