Hi all,

New forums are... different... I'm hoping this post doesn't get lost! >.>

Ok, so I'm having a bother, but allow me to explain exactly what I'm doing first:

I've made body hair for Annie (V4) by creating full body trans & displacement maps and applying them to a duplicate V4 figure with all morphs cloned from the original. Basically, I pose Annie, then I use pose dots to match the 'hair' figure to her. this technique has been working pretty much perfectly for me apart from in RayTrace reflections. Attached is an example of the problem I'm having; her arm appears mangled in the reflection, but when I remove the hair figure, it reflects fine. So far, I have been rendering twice, once with the hair and once without, then compositing the good reflection in Photoshop, but I'd like the hair reflected.

Perhaps it's a setting, maybe in the camera, maybe in render settings? The main surface of the hair figure lies flush with the surface of the main figure, but the displacement raises the hairs above the main figure surface, which is what gives the effect. This is the only way I've found to get it working well enough for the kind of work I'm doing.

Can anyone advise, please?

Thanks,

Glen.

I have trouble believing the hair needs to be seen in reflections because without it somebody would notice - really doubt it. In which case I'd just make it invisible to ray tracing.

If you want to keep it, perhaps adjusting the car's reflect node ray bias would help.

In this particular render I doubt it would be noticeable, however, in others, it could well be. This is just an example of what happens with every render I attempt that contains RT reflections.

At the moment, the reflect node's ray bias is set at 0.3. I'll have a go at raising it, then lowering it. I'll update on the results.

Thanks,

Glen.

 two things come to mind:

 - when you've duplicated your "body chick" to a "hair chick" and altered materials, then you just might take the latter and Conform To the first. Both figures have the same bone structure, and that saves you the reposing efforts. Just be sure to take the first one for posing.

 - ray bias is measured in your own units (0.3 is default for inches, so when units are meters then it says 0.07620). It is meant to avoid unwanted reflections of surface parts resulting from the displacement (mapped or modelled) of the same surface. It results in everything within that range being ignored in reflction.
But the car hood does not have any displacements at all. So, just set raybias to 0.000000
(for instance, eyes should have a raybias of 1" to avoid the nose being reflected. Facial skin reflectivity should also have raybias of 1" otherwise the ears become visible when backlighing, thanks to fresnel).  

I would lose the body hair skinsuit and go with blender node.  mangling of arm may be refractive shadow casting, i.e. one transparent/refractive surface close to another surface, blocking raytrace bounces.  turn off raytracing for body hair like you did for head hair.  speeds it up quite a bit.  I posted zoom-in as new forum software doesn't open new window when clicking on img in safari.

Hey, thanks! Hmm, I've tried conforming one V4 to another before and it's all gotten ugly, but that was a few Posers ago, so I'll try again.

As for the raybias and stuff... I'm not sure what's happening now, but Annie herself is appearing fragmented, and by that, I mean not in reflections! In fact, so is the car; everything's getting mangled now, it's really weird! Time to close Poser and restart with the original project the above render came from I think. I hate it when this kind of thing happens. -.-

Thanks,

Glen.

man, that's weird!  don't forget to update to sr5

It's only just started happening, even with projects that were previously fine, having changed literally nothing; just render it again and it's all mangled. I'm thinking it's something PC related, like GPU. Worrying, this machine cost a fortune and I haven't had it five minutes!

 I honestly can't even see the arm hair in the blown up version.

Poser is not supposed to use the GPU, not saying it can't be hardware related but seems unlikely. Try to reproduce the problem in a new scene or try to simplify an existing one by removing objects to as few as possible to see if its related to a specific mesh or render parameter. 

It is related to the hair figure, ubt it's only just started happening and I've not changed anything at all; no updates, no new installs, nothing. 

Ghostship2, you need glasses, even in the small version, her arm hair is clearly visible. Besides, as I keep saying, it's not just this render, it's all renders with Annie.

The reason I'm using a separate figure is because I've never been able to get a decent result using the hair material directly on her skin. I've gone through a whole 'nother thread solely on this and I couldn't make anyone understand there, so I'll refrain from trying to make anyone understand here. Just know that placing the hair material onto her skin doesn't work for me. ;)

Thanks folks, hopefully things will right themselves, I don't know. :/

Here's another render with Annie. I don't know how, but the wet skin shader somehow reacted with the hair figure and made her arm hair look wet too, so it really worked out well! You can't tell me you can't see it here, right? ;)