Ornatrix 3dsmax: Millions of hairs?

Hi, I am working on a tiger in 3ds max using vray as the render engine. Ornatrix works beautifully but I am still trying to understand how to reach photo-realistic results. As you might notice from one of my latest test renders, I am facing two main issues: 1. hair number. my tiger has 2.000.000 hairs but sill as you can see, the nose area looks like many strands are still missing. I have tested with 4.000.000 hairs, the result looks better but render times are too high when I reach that level. is it normal to have 4, 5, 6 millions of hair strands to get good results with high resoution images? I am doing something wrong? 2. hair clustering. is there any suggestion you would give me to create the kind of clusters that a tiger has around the snout? I have tried with "hair clustering" and "strand clustering" but still can't get any good result. Thanks for your support, marco Attached Files:
26 May 2015 #6131
Michael McCarthy	Hello, You are looking pretty good thus far. If you need this extreme close up on the tiger you may need to render a large amount of hairs for that shot. Short hair can be tricking and you may need a lot of it. I would check your camera shots and see what you need for the production. You might be able to up the count just for a few shots that need it. Some other things that can help are Surface comb these areas. Even very short hair will look better and more dense combed slighting. If its sticking strait up its hard to get the density you may want or need Try using a density map on the character or having a separate hair object for the snout. This will allow you to have a localized area that has a high hair count but not everywhere on the character. adjust short hair to be a but thicker or have a thicker root. This can fill out some areas without adding more hair. Short hair is thicker in most cases anyhow. You can do this with a map or with a separate hair object. Not sure what issues you are running into with clustering. If you can post an example that would help. Thanks Michael
26 May 2015 #6132
extensoft	Hi Michael, and thanks a lot for your help. In fact, since I have posted the message, my progresses involved: density map: with this map the 3 million hairs applied to the tiger seem to work better, because only the snout area uses most of them, with the body (that longer hair covers pretty well) looks good with less hairs. thickness map. In any case, your feedback also helped me to confirm that in certain cases, as for high resolution close ups, hair number matters! Most of my renders need to be at 4k res, so i really need to find the best balance between hair number and render speed (or PC crash due to memory issues). In fact, at lower res, the tiger looks fine with less hair applied. Ragarding the cluster topic: it's a very hard task, because I am trying to replicate perfectly the look of a tiger's "crown", around the snout. But test render after test render, I'm hoping to reach a decent render soon. Thanks again for your support! Marco

Posted by:		extensoft
Data created:	25 May 2015