Arcanox
05-19-2006, 12:00 PM
I'm trying to create a head of thick full hair with shag hair. I've been going along and using splines and placing attractors here and there and I'm very satisfied with the actual shape of the hair style. My problem is mainly the way I'm lighting my scene, I'm using a skylight with an HDR map instead of a set of standard point lights. Now shag hair doesn't react very well to skylights and the gi shadowing associated with it, so I converted the hair into geometry.
Render times are reasonable, longest is 2 minutes with the settings cranked, and thus far the hair looks perfect. My problem is system resources, initially the hair had too much geometry detail and it was causing out of memory errors and all sorts of other wonderful shag hair crashes. I reduced the amount of geometry in the hair strands and this seems to have fixed my problem temporarily.
To achieve the thick and full hair look I want, I will have to crank up the hair density, but this will undoubtibly cause more errors. So really at this point I'm open to suggestions on how to add more strands without rendering my scene... unrenderable. Is there a way to get the hair shader to react to GI properly? Or some way to compress the memory it takes to manage the geometry strands? Please don't tell me I have to go out and get annother 2 gigs of ram :(
Render times are reasonable, longest is 2 minutes with the settings cranked, and thus far the hair looks perfect. My problem is system resources, initially the hair had too much geometry detail and it was causing out of memory errors and all sorts of other wonderful shag hair crashes. I reduced the amount of geometry in the hair strands and this seems to have fixed my problem temporarily.
To achieve the thick and full hair look I want, I will have to crank up the hair density, but this will undoubtibly cause more errors. So really at this point I'm open to suggestions on how to add more strands without rendering my scene... unrenderable. Is there a way to get the hair shader to react to GI properly? Or some way to compress the memory it takes to manage the geometry strands? Please don't tell me I have to go out and get annother 2 gigs of ram :(