MarcusKyler
05-17-2008, 07:00 AM
I have a scene with Maya fur for a beard. I'm using rasterizer in mental ray with ray tracing enabled and high detail shadow maps. Basically the way Master Zapp suggests. My lights are really close to the fur as well. Now the fur looks fine without shading enabled, but as soon as I use detailed shadow maps, or self shadowing, the fur turns black in large areas. It's suppose to brown. I've tried increasing the intensity of the lights but that just makes the specularity near white contrasting atop of black fur. I've turned the fur base and tip colors to a really light brown almost a tan color, it works..... But I still get annoying black spots on parts of the beard that don't look like they belong. I've even tried using a lighter shadow color with no success. The ligting doesn't look natural because the fur is so dark it makes the beard look fake. My hunch is it's my scene setup, I've tried lighting fur in a new scene and it looks fine. It may even be the scale of the scene, everything is really large. I'm pretty much all out of ideas if anyone knows what I should try next please help. I'll post pics if that helps. I've got pennies for anyone that wants to get paid. :D Thanks for reading this far.