Light linking Maya hair?

[kanooshka]

I worked with Maya hair for the first time recently and the biggest issue with it that I had is that since it's paintfx it can't be light linked. I scoured the internet looking for a way to light link hair but from everything I've seen you cannot. But I may be wrong....and hope I am.

[usma1000]

Were you able to do anything to get around that problem? Since I am not animating, I suppose I could convert paintfx to polygons, but I will save that as a last resort.

[tharrell]

I normally end up using render layers and just selectively add the lights I need to my hair layer when I'm working with hair or fur in Maya. No matter if I'm using mental, PRMan, maya fur, pfx hair, shave, whatever.

Particularly useful because you typically need to give a LOT of love to hair or fur shadowing in comp, so just add your body as a shadowcatcher with useBackground.

It also lets you get started on scene rendering while you're still mucking around with your hair, and it makes it much easier to re-render just the hair in frame 167 if the dynamics flip out in that frame, etc.

--T

[usma1000]

Thanks. I was trying to avoid using render layers since I have very little experience with them, but I see no way out of this. Could you expand on what you said about the use background shader? Would I make it white and apply that to the body, then multiply in comp? Again, thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.

[tharrell]

Thanks. I was trying to avoid using render layers since I have very little experience with them, but I see no way out of this. Could you expand on what you said about the use background shader? Would I make it white and apply that to the body, then multiply in comp? Again, thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.

Basically, you set up a use background shader with reflection turned off but leave shadow masking on and it'll become a shadow catcher... no object visibility, but shadows will be in your alpha channel. Just make sure that you set an override to your body geo render attributes on your hair layer so that the body doesn't cast shadows on itself.

You don't set overrides on your masterLayer, just on additional render layers. You can right click almost any attribute and set a layer override... including most stuff in your render globals.

--T

[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.