In a previous thread, the subject of strand based hair surfaced. As an animator (like most of you), I'm always looking for ways to shorten the rendertime of frames, while still maintaining the highest quality possible. So with that in mind, strand-based hair never appealed to me, especially if I could get the look I want from modelled hair, without sacrificing realism. However, there are many instances were model hair is simply not going to get the movement you may want or need, especially if your goal is realism. So, strand hair is the other solution.

As a test of production rendering for animation using strand-based hair, I've put together several stills using "Hair and Fur" in 3dsmax 7.5. Here's some information on these renders:

Hair: Hair and Fur module in 3dsmax 7.5, buffer mode
Scene: 1 figure (13,708 polygons), 35,000 polygons total, 9000 hair strands
Lighting: 3 standard spotlights; 2 with depth shadows (bias:0.1, size: 1024, sample range: 10), and one keylight with area shadows.
Renderer: MentalRay; 1/4 pixel samples, Gauss filter
Render Size: 720x480
System: Single 2 gig Pentium 4, 1 gig RAM

With each new hair style, the only change is in the materials and styling. The strand count is the same in each instance, although thickness may have been altered slightly. Render times are located on each image:

Medium-length Blonde
Medium-length Brunette/Wet Style or Gel Look
Frizzy/Afro Style
Long Blonde Hair

Clearly, judging by these render times, strand-based hair is definitely do-able for animation purposes on a single machine, and even moreso over a network. However, there are many limitations too, such as: you MUST use spotlights, or else the shadows don't show up. Omni lights are out, unless for fill lighting. If you want GI, you need to either render the hair with their own lights as a seperate render pass, or else suffer the result of very high rendertime from using dome lights (lots of lights on a hemisphere). The hair won't render shadows if you use true GI, unless you turn it to geometry, which would make it 10x slower. If you have a huge network of 90 machines, then go for it. ;-)

If anyone would like to share the results of their own strand-based hair tests using other platforms (like Poser, Lightwave, or Maya), I'd love to see them. Please post rendertime and detailed information about the renders so we can get an idea how viable they are for "amateur" animation on those platforms. This is basically about rendertimes vs. quality.

Message edited on: 02/04/2006 18:29

---

Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.