Suppose I have some hair (for e.g) that looks great with the texture AA set to 100% but I don't want the whole scene to have that much.  Is there any way I can specify just that texture gets the 100% AA ?

I have a horrible feeling the answer is going to be "no" but you never know

Regards

Frank

Errrmmm............................................................................................no! sorry ;) Yes quality hair takes a long time to render. There are a few things you can do. If I use the Aery Soul Liltsure hair for instance I usually turn of "receive shadows" for the material, which saves a LOT of render time! You can see the difference of course but it does not look unnatural to me. Or render the scene with normal quality without the hair and then do an area render with the quality settings and with the hair....

There is a way to set AA per material via the check box in the top right  half of the Advanced Material Editor within the "Effects" section, but alas I don't think there is a way to actually specify how much AA a material gets....it's either off or on.
Just had a look at the Function Editor and there is nothing there too.

True, but it only switches AA on or off for the defined material, it does not set any quality... By the way, if you set the quality slider of AA to 100% it does not mean that Vue will use all the "Subrays per pixel" you have defined in the settings. What I have undestood is, that it will use at least the minimum amount of Subrays per pixel, and then will use more untill it decides the quality of AA for that pixel has reached 100% or the maximum of "Subrays per pixel" has been used. What I am trying to say is: If you set a minimum of 12 and a maximum of 100, with a quality of 40%, the renderer might use the 12 "Subrays per pixel" for every pixel. Even though 2 might be enough for some areas (blue sky) while 40% will not be enough quality for other areas (hair).

hmmm thanks guys - I'll have to have a fiddle around with some of the settings.  The render isn't bad per se but there's some odd black marks in the hair that I'm damned if I can get rid of any other way.  FWIW, it's 3Dreams Diva hair for V4.

Are you sure you have increased the settings (specifically the "Max trace level") within the Sub-ray Options of the Render Options?
If you are working with transparencies you may  not be allowing the renderer to send rays past enough "hair layers" to produce the desired transparency.

Try upping the "Max trace level" to between 8 and 10 and test render the area and see if that makes any difference.

I'll give that a try - you never know :)
Thanks for the help

well, it sort of worked - in the end, I changed the hair colour to black - solves the problem :)