Tips on Rendering Maya Fur?

[macmayaguy]

Fur can be a nightmare.

I can tell from glancing at yours you need to really crank down the "specular" color. Seriously down to to 1-10 range. Why? I have no idea.

To get rid of the dark areas you probably need to manually paint in your equalizer map, this let's you make the fur denser and lighter in certain areas. It's tedious but works pretty well.

Also, if you're using Maya Software, remember you need to select your light then go to the fur menu and add fur shadowing attributes. You'll have to do this to all lights effecting your fur. More light's the longer the render time. :-P

Personally I still render fur in MentalRay. You don't have to add the light attributes and you get the benefit of rendering to passes to help you tune it after.

Another trick is to use render layers to render the fur by itself and put a background shader or a black surface shader with it's alpha cranked up so that the surface renders blank and you can only have the lights you want affecting the fur in that layer. It's a second render but it's much faster and you can composite after.

Oh and if you do render in MentalRay you can get really nice results if you turn up your sampling. At render time expense of course. Oh, and you can render 32bit which will give you MUCH finer color correction control, which is important in helping match your geometry layer later.

But if you can get the results with Maya Software go for it. It's so much faster.

Hope some of this helps.

[Puppet|]

With mental ray...
For Fur and Hair rendering use only rasterizer mode. It's 10x faster than scanline/raytrace.
And use only "Detail Shadowmap" instead of "Raytrace Shadow" or "Regular Shadowmap".

[royterr]

With mental ray...
For Fur and Hair rendering use only rasterizer mode. It's 10x faster than scanline/raytrace.
And use only "Detail Shadowmap" instead of "Raytrace Shadow" or "Regular Shadowmap".

but the rasteriser wont render motion blur in reflections?
what would you do if you had a fury creature moving on ice or a mirror with motion blur?

[eaclou]

Thanks everyone, i'll try experimenting with some of those options when I get home tonight.

Hopefully using Rasterizer in MR will allow my slow computer to render at a reasonable speed (not 20 minutes for 320x240).

It's sometimes hard to find all the options for rendering when they're in 30 different places (render settings, fur object, hypershade, the light itself, camera, etc.)

[SreckoM]

Try not to use ambient lights.
Also try to set Fur shader to Volume not Hair Primitive, I think that gives better/quicker results: Fur->Fur Render Settings

[visua]

http://www.djx.com.au/blog/2008/06/29/tips-for-rendering-maya-fur-with-mentalray/

[Puppet|]

but the rasteriser wont render motion blur in reflections?
what would you do if you had a fury creature moving on ice or a mirror with motion blur?
Sorry, but I have never needed it.
But if you really need it...
You may compute beauty hair pass with rasterizer, but reflection with scanline (it will be very very slow).

More suggestions hairs rendering...
1. If possible don't use transparent hair. For soft look better to use more hair count and more thin hairs.
2. Don't use area light or raytrace shadow even if scanline or raytrace.
3. If you are using rasterizer use less "shading quality" (0.2-0.5) for faster rendering.
4. Use undercoat fur with more thick hairs.

For example I have furred character with about 2-2.5 millions hairs, with 4 lights, in Full HD for 3 minutes.


You may also view this tutorial:
http://www.djx.com.au/blog/2009/04/14/p_hairtk-p_hairtk_shadow-p_shader_replacer/

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