3ds max 2009 hair & fur mental ray problems

[BobbyB]

Hey can you post some of your specs and render times and ill let you know if your render times seem slow

info like hair count, hair passes
and computer cpu and render times


and are you using final gather with mental ray, also was this with MR primitive or all with buffer.

Render time are a big thing that cripple fur productions, it has improved over the years with the buffer render being multithreading in 2009, and with computers getting faster it becomes more pleasant to work with.

One thing i recommend with hair and mental ray, is try using the fast raster option in the render options, and also be careful of having to much hair, I find sometimes if doing something like final gather and having and the hair count to high that it can tend to cripple the render, just to much geometry, and to much intersecting geometry for it to handle.

Ooo and why i think of it i asked the forum to do some bench mark renders of a fur ball once, you might want to compare your machine to the ones that did the test, this was a buffer render however. The link to the file that was tested is still active if you want to compare

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=604270


Cheers

Rob

[musashidan]

Some good tips there.However,alot of folk seem to render their hair pass seperately in the scanline still.This is something you might want to look into and also a good inclination of MR's poor hair render integration.

[BobbyB]

Yes both ways have their pros and cons. The hard part about fur is fitting it into an existing pipeline and workflow

One thing with mental ray I recommend is to make sure the hair tip thickness actually has some thickness. You can do a render with buffer and it looks nice with 0 thickness and then try the same settings in Mray and get not so nice a look. Mray handles the hair better if the hair geometry is not fading off into nothing.

I my self when using fur have mostly used the buffer/scanline option and done passes, however recently i have renewed my look into Mray options. It is sometimes worth revisiting options that you may have disregarded in the past, if at the very least to disregarded then again.

Cheers

Rob

[musashidan]

How does MR handle raytraced shadows of hair/fur in animation? I'd be interested to see if the integration in Max10 is tighter regarding rendering hair/fur with the latest build of MR.

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