Experimenting a bit with the Hair in P5.... I found by assigning multiple groups, a better looking hair is achieved....however...it appears to me that about 2gig of ram is needed. (SYSTEM SPEC AT END OF MESSAGE) If I have more than 3 groups, my system turns to mush....the renderer reverts to hard drive...churning in slow motion...it is using a lot of hard drive space as well...I canceled the render...it took nearly 5 minutes for the drive to stop... Perhaps my technique is not the way to make hair...I wanted a smooth layered style...I assigned a strip for group 1...with 2500 hairs..then to the left of it the next etc of polygons, same length, etc....but when I created the 4th group...my system was begging for mercy...it was just too memory intensive. Skull cap perhaps? or multiple pieces...but then again, you still end up with many hair groups.. Of course one group makes some decent looking hair, but it also is more difficult to shape and bend...possible but more difficult IMO... Any ideas, techniques to make this more render friendly? What have you guys experienced with rendering? I realize it even states in the manual that hair creation is a resource hog, but this is indeed limiting to what I can achieve with P5... AMD XP1800+ 512meg ram GF3Ti500 64meg video 140gig hard drive

Why use so many hairs? If you are layering, you shouldbe able to get away with fewer hairs per group and still have a full looking style.

that's true...it is pretty thick with 2500...believe it or not, I was using 5000 for awhile :) I'll cut it back...and give it a twirl...what I was doing however, seemed much more realistic with the larger hair count...as things were going in different directions....

I wonder if one of those hair beta testers would care to shed some knowledge...?

Not a beta tester (but then perhaps in a sence we all are:)) but I found 4 or 5 thousand hairs sufficiant if you layer them corectly. try setting up a hairstyle with thicker groups underneath you can make them thin out at the tips and a few thinner groups on top to provide the whispy textures.

wdupre... what system specs are you doing this on? That was what I was doing..4500-5000 on bottom...but after 3 groups...my system just couldn't handle it...all rendering was on the hard drive. I then scaled back to 2500...same deal...better, but not to the point I want to try and use it this way...just too slow, especially in the developement stages...using p4 renderer is better, but you don't get the same hair look, so when you do FF it may not be quite the same.... I'm going to back down as much as possible to see how it looks, but I've already noted even with layering, there are some pretty thin spots---it also looks different depending on how the light is hitting...angle, intensity, etc..and the camera angle...

What I ment was 4 to 5 thousand hairs total. and have a top section of pretty thick hairs also using a textured scullcap will help hide thin spots. and make sure you dont pull those top hairs too tight. I am also working on an idea for a modification of the scullcap. I'll post it in free stuff if it works. It'll be my first freestuff contribution here:) the hair does slow things down immensely not much you can do about that. I have a much slower processer then you at the momenta(TB 800) though my 2.53gh is on it's way:) but I presently have 768 mb of ram and I've put 10.000 hairs on one figure but I could barely turn her and the render time is a lot slower.

How about dymantic clothing for hair layers? Please remember who you got this valuable tip from ;-) Waldoo

I have rendered 20,000 hairs in about 2 hours on my PIII-850 with 1 gig ram. I bet you checked the box "show populated". Don't do that! it will kill your system trying to draw all those hairs. leave it unchecked and the hairs will show up when you render. I know the manual says you have to check it. But experience says you don't.

wdupre said, "I found 4 or 5 thousand hairs sufficiant if you layer them corectly" Hey...since I turned forty I found 40 or fifty hairs to be sufficient if you grow them reeeeeal long, comb them back and forth over each other and anchor them down with White Rain hairspray....and never go outdoors on windy days... Scarab