how to create realistic hair in maya mental ray?

[pap87]

Paint FX don't render in mental ray, you need to convert them to polygons. Or you can use the Hair that comes with Maya Unlimited to render with mental ray ( I think ).

[keiko123]

hmm..i've tried convert the hair into poly. but it looks so bad....hmm....actually most of the turotial i found on the web is to teach u to use the paint effect to create hair in maya....
if i want to create this type of hair
http://tinypic.com/25qu1qg.jpg
do i do it with paint effect too??

[h2o]

They use grids & texture maps to do hair ... it's an old method but convenience for rendering

[AndrewRaZ]

this topic comes up a couple times a month in most forums. the search function works wonders, as does google.

the image you posted looks like something from SquareEnix. if that's true, they have their own hair software, which they spent millions developing.

all the various ways of rendering hair that i know of in Maya:

polygon/nurbs/subd hair and texture it. fast renders, if textured and shaded well, can give good results. used in games, and can be set up with dynamics. this is the easiest method, both in terms of setup and in terms of render time.

PaintFX hair: relatively simple to set up, lots of options, can be bound to fur or hair to create dynamics i think, but i don't know how. never been real keen on the specularity though. if you convert pfx to polys, you will need to increase your sampling, which will increase your render times dramatically.

Maya Hair in Mental Ray: in the Mental Ray Features tab of the render globals, turn on "render fur/hair". you will need to increase some settings in MR, notably the sampling. they recomend using the rapid production hair preset as a jumping off point.

Provide3D's Hair Shader for Mental Ray: discussed in this topic (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=161420&page=1&pp=15), and you can buy the product now from Provide3D (http://www.provide3d.com/). it makes use of Mental Ray's hair primitive and hair shaders, which for some reason aren't utilized in Maya (Alias/Autodesk, are you listening for once?). in any case, it's a small price to pay for production, but for students, you may want to try a different method. there are supposedly some similar shaders, but i haven't been able to find them when i needed them.

render in layers/passes: this is the best bet if you want 'real' hair: render your character in mental ray, and your hair in maya software. why? because maya's software renderer is optimized for hair, and renders about 10 times faster than MR, and uses *far* less memory. if you can get a character to render with displacements, skin simulations, *and* hair in a single pass without memory overrun aborts, i think half the people on CGTalk will quit their jobs and work for you. in other words, there have been experts trying to do it, and it's ain't easy. rendering in layers is really the way to go. if you don't have a compositing program, you can just have maya render into photoshop layers, and you can batch process them into a targa later.

a final option could be an external hair program, like Shave and a Haircut, which is a darned good program, i hear. Shave has capabilities to render to MR easily, but its native renderer is faster and better looking.

one final note of advice: hair in any program is finicky, picky, and gimicky. it takes a bit of work to figure out how to set it up usually, and then there's a boatload of things you have to learn in order to get it to behave the way you want.

take a look at what you need your shot to do, and then take the easiest method possible to achieve it. there's no need to do all kinds of other stuff if not necessary.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.