Hi Guys, hope you can help :) 

I'm working with Hair strips and rendering in V-Ray. 

I'm trying to take precise control of the colour of HAIR STRIPS hair. 

• From Root to Tip (but with more control than just a root and tip colour. (i.e. a gradient would be great)
• I'd also like to control the hue of the hair overall. (i.e. the equivilent of stripes on a tiger or spots on a leopard.) 

I have been tryong to solve this for many hours - so have scoured the forum, watched all relivent tutorials I can etc. I understand the following...

Usually you can control root to tip colour (or furball hair) by applying a gradient ramp and switching to WU co-ordinates (at 90 degrees). I've tried this on a furball. No problem here. 

Using Max Scanline renderer I can get the Hair strips to inherit the colour that is applied to the underlying control mesh. i.e. the hair inherits the UVs of the control mesh. Great - as demonstrated in one of your tutorials. 

However, this functionality does not seem to carry through to V-Ray rendering. (right?). I have tried all possible variables in gradient orientation, use or non-use of the "Create W" co-ordinate, and inherit UVs from Strips. Indeed, I've carefully isolated every variable in search of an answer. 

That's when I watched your video introducing the VRayHairInfoTex map type. At last- I thought I'd solved it. However...no matter how I try, the only functionality this seems to allow is to give me a root colour and a tip colour. (and bias). The Tip Colour and Root colour both have Map slots - but for the life of me I can't get a gradient map to work using these. 

What I'd really like is for the VRay generated Hair to simply inherit the polygon UVs and colouration, just as it does when using the Scanline renderer. 

Hoping you can point out an answer. Maybe I have to convert my Strip hair into mesh Hair...and then convert the Mesh Hair into Guides and then rebuild all the OxModifiers? 

Your advice warmly recieved. 

Ed Taylor