A Simple Hair Question

[quietrob]

I have a render going. It's going to be a long render. It's clear that the hair takes the longest to render. Thinking of @seachnasaigh notes on paying the render price for things I do need, I looked at the hair.

Why is the hair, in this case, black hair, a light emitter? Is that why rendering hair takes so much time?

Hmm...I guess that was two questions.

 

[RAMWolff]

If your hair has transmaps in place you just answered your own question. Transmaps are of course translucency maps that make the hair look more realistic but the light in the scene has to bounce off of all those little bits and so your render will be very very long, esp in portrait types of renders. Test it, zoom your character way out, do a test render, it will go faster, bring it in about half way and see your render time increase and then back to where you want it and your render time will be crazy. In iRAY I don't have that issue but in 3DL it's a nightmare for time. Black hair should always have extra settings applied to it to make it shinier. It's like doing black skin, you want to make sure the gloss of the skin is upped so it's got the right values to actually show up in a render. Google black hair, black skin, you will see what I'm talking about. It's also about finding the right balance. I've seen some black hair renders blown out as well dark skin....

 

[quietrob]

I did a quick render without the light emitters and indeed the render time dropped sharply but the hair looked dull. Trying it again with lighting emitters turned on.

 

[RAMWolff]

You using Poser or DS, 3DL, iRAY, Firefly or Superfly?

 

[quietrob]

I am using Poser Pro 11 and Firefly. They can be less realistic when it comes to rendering but I want something different than a photographic look.

My time did indeed go through the roof. Roughly five hours to complete a 1930 by 1080 size at 300 DPI. The biggest hangout was the hair. The hair alone took hours. Anytime it finished a section without hair, it zipped along at a nice clip.

 

[RAMWolff]

Yup, I guess that's one thing that Poser and DAZ Studio have in common using the older rendering engines. Transmaps slow things WAY WAY down.

 

[seachnasaigh]

I have a render going. It's going to be a long render. It's clear that the hair takes the longest to render. Thinking of @seachnasaigh notes on paying the render price for things I do need, I looked at the hair.

Why is the hair, in this case, black hair, a light emitter? Is that why rendering hair takes so much time?

Hmm...I guess that was two questions.

The term "light emitter" as used in the properties tab of the parameters panel might actually be better described as "participates -usually passively- in light bounce calculations", but that wouldn't fit in the little UI panel, so they used "light emitter". Many people untick the "light emitter" box for hair to save render time. I prefer to use BB's Superfly hair shader, because light *does* interact with hair.

You might want to try BB's Superfly hair shader; just plug in your hair model's transmap (and color map if you like, but the shader will run with a procedural color). Hopefully, the link goes to the exact post with the downlink.
It looks like node spaghetti, but the only nodes you need are the transmap, the procedural/mapped color switch, and the color map if the color switch is set to use a map. I only have one machine running and she's busy rendering, but I can screenshot those nodes later.

 

[seachnasaigh]

I've highlighted and annotated the relevant nodes of BB's hair shader. I haven't tried it in Firefly.

 

[quietrob]

I've been reading this and the hair shader thread over at the SM forum. Most of it's beyond my head or I would have a decent fur coat by now. But as I say MOST of my renders are Firefly, I do make Superfly renders from time to time. Doing it right and it's like you can get a photograph from the past. I'll set up a Superfly Render of at least one portrait I'm working on and see how it does during Adult Swim tonight (Ghost in the Shell is just the best!).

The thread is four months old and it looks like there has been some tweaking since Bagginsbill answered the challenge of an easy but great hair shader for poser. Easy it's not. I count 49 different parameters on that screen shot but it sounds like your saying I only need to change 4 parameters. Two out of the four with the color I'll be using. The transmap which is most likely supplied by the modeler and a single math input if I'm using a color map. Oh, and the color map. Make that 5 parameters.

Doesn't sound too hard.

Downloaded the BB SF Hair(shader)

 

[Glitterati3D]

I've been reading this and the hair shader thread over at the SM forum. Most of it's beyond my head or I would have a decent fur coat by now. But as I say MOST of my renders are Firefly, I do make Superfly renders from time to time. Doing it right and it's like you can get a photograph from the past. I'll set up a Superfly Render of at least one portrait I'm working on and see how it does during Adult Swim tonight (Ghost in the Shell is just the best!).

The thread is four months old and it looks like there has been some tweaking since Bagginsbill answered the challenge of an easy but great hair shader for poser. Easy it's not. I count 49 different parameters on that screen shot but it sounds like your saying I only need to change 4 parameters. Two out of the four with the color I'll be using. The transmap which is most likely supplied by the modeler and a single math input if I'm using a color map. Oh, and the color map. Make that 5 parameters.

Doesn't sound too hard.

Downloaded the BB SF Hair(shader)

Rob, AmethystPendant put this shader into EZBBHair for easy loading and use. There's a link to download it in this thread: EZBBHair

Now, this is for SUPERFLY, not Firefly and it will also greatly increase render time in SF.

 

[quietrob]

Rob, AmethystPendant put this shader into EZBBHair for easy loading and use. There's a link to download it in this thread: EZBBHair

Now, this is for SUPERFLY, not Firefly and it will also greatly increase render time in SF.

I, of course want less render time not more but I'm thinking some sacrifices have to be done when you are going for realism.

 

[Glitterati3D]

I, of course want less render time not more but I'm thinking some sacrifices have to be done when you are going for realism.

Of course, all true. I was just commenting that this didn't solve your problem....

There's no doubt the BB Hair shader is very nice and well done. But, as I said...........wrong shader for your preferred at the moment render engine.

 

[seachnasaigh]

@quietrob For Firefly and render time reduction, just try un-ticking light emitter for the hair. If the results are good, you're done.

 

[Dreamer]

@quietrob For firefly there is this BB Shader should hair be anistropics in material That I found worked rather well as I used it on the hair here:

Healing

• Dreamer
• Apr 21, 2017
• 2
• poser 11

From memory it didn't add that much to the render times