So far, it seems no matter which hair I use, the blonde texture renders to look white or gray with iray and an environment map. I tried other HDR images - it still looks white/grey.

Three possibilities.

1. The texture isn't loading properly. (Check on the surface pane to make sure the texture is loaded.)
2. The lights are too strong. Make sure your lights (Light parameters) are not too bright, to include your HDRI (Under Render settings) and your Tone mapping is correct for your lighting. (Render pane.)
3. The gamma setting on the texture is wrong. (Surface pane on the texture texture editor.)

1 I checked. 2 - There are no lights except the Environment Dome. Not sure about tone mapping. I will check it.

1. Not sure - I will check and try some other settings. You mean for the hair? It's the default when I apply the iray texture.

flibbits posted at 9:52AM Sat, 28 January 2017 - #4296080

1 I checked. 2 - There are no lights except the Environment Dome. Not sure about tone mapping. I will check it.

1. Not sure - I will check and try some other settings. You mean for the hair? It's the default when I apply the iray texture.

Default is not necessarily correct, unfortunately. Tone mapping is likely your most likely culprit. Since you are using an environment dome, is it visible?

On the side of your render pane is a little expansion box. Open that, and if your dome is visible, you can adjust tone mapping during a render without losing progress of your render. You can even do it once the render is complete. Then you will know if ti is the tone mapping or not.

Double checked: the texture is loaded, and the HDRI light (environment is on. No idea how to check tone mapping.

No idea how to check gamma setting on the texture.

I saw that while base color was set to the proper texture, all the other settings that include an image file were set to the white texture. I changed them all to blonde, but it still looks white in render. For all other colors (in this case using Fraser Hair), base color is the image for the hair color (black, red, brown, etc.) while the other settings like Glossy Layered Weight use the white texture. Those all look OK in render: black looks black, brown looks brown, red looks red. But blonde looks white.

I am adding the hair, then applying the iray material. No settings are changed from default. There are no lights except the environment map HDRI source.

"On the side of your render pane is a little expansion box. Open that, and if your dome is visible, you can adjust tone mapping during a render without losing progress of your render. You can even do it once the render is complete. Then you will know if ti is the tone mapping or not."

Render settings? I see tone mapping in there - adjusted some of the settings for test renders. Still the hair looks white instead of blonde.

I can't change those settings during a render.

On the window with the render itself. Left side, about halfway up. Small rectangular button.

There is no such button in my render window. Is that a feature of 4.9? I use 4.8.

I had what appears to be a similar problem with blonde hair rendering very light in Iray. I was using Fantasy hair by 3DUniverse. I experimented with some of the texture settings and when I changed the Base Mixing option from "PBR Specular/Gosssiness" to "Weighted" I ended up with something that looked more reasonable.

I'll give it a try.

Oh really? I'll check that out too. Having the same problems with all blonde hairs and Iray, no matter what kind of light, no matter what kind of hair (yes, iray shaders in use). Basically I'm fixing those things with Photoshop after rendering right now. But I'm having problems with Iray in general. Some scenes have been ended up OK, after several hours of clicking random stuff.. In a scala from 1 to 10 where 1 is easy and 10 is hard, I would give Iray a 15. To compare, Hollywood Standard render engine (Arnold) would be around 3

" I experimented with some of the texture settings and when I changed the Base Mixing option from "PBR Specular/Gosssiness" to "Weighted" I ended up with something that looked more reasonable...."

Where is that found?

You can find it on the surfaces editor tab. (See attached)

snakegrab posted at 2:21PM Thu, 16 February 2017 - #4297679

You can find it on the surfaces editor tab. (See attached)

If the Iray Uber Base shader is applied.