Blonde female Wip

[Destrega]

Hi guys,

I just got Hairfarm for 2 days now, and wanted to share my current Wip here with you, in order to get some tips for the hair:) Im currently working on a female character with long, blonde hair. At first I used Max's hair and fur, which kinda workded a bit, cause Vray 1.5 Sp5 are supporting the MR prim type, so that the results were ok. However, we all know that creating hairstyles with hair and fur is a nightmare, so I came to the Hairfarm Demo, saw that it was a thousand times better at glance and asked my boss for a license for my workstation:) So here I am with the progress I got so far, with my very limited knowledge of this great plugin. The Character itself is rendered in Vray, and I rendered the hair in Scanline, cause I noticed it is much faster somehow (is this right?) I made a double light setup, vray lights for the Char and omni for the hairs. I placed lots of modifiers on the hair, like a basic structure of kind of layer style. So I got the base layers with 20000 hairs with some clusters, frizz and kink, then add a 2n generate hair modifier using a bit stronger frizz and kink, and on thop I placed a third generate hair mod. with only 400 thinner hairs and lots of kink and frizz.
I think it looks already quite nice, but there should be lots of room to improve I think:) (Her hair at the back is flying a bit in the air, thats ok because there is a jacket which is just hidden)
Allright, hopefully someone does know how to improve the rendering:)
Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Erasmus

[cem]

Thanks much for posting your WIP. It looks really good already. "2 days" is a very short time for learning a new tool and producing such a result!

For better rendering results, you can turn off "speed up" from the Hair Farm Renderer settings. Render times will go up a bit, but the result will be nicer. Alternatively, you can set the speed-up parameter to "lights and shadows only."

The hair rendering time for v-ray should be similar to scanline, though Hair Farm has some optimizations with scanline that can make it slightly faster than other renderers. Try increasing the bucket size to max value for fastest rendering.

[Woodys3d]

As Cem said, turning on speed up is the first you could do.

Also, looking at the hairs in front of the ear it looks like they are too thin or that there are too few of them (human hair has something from 100k to 140k hairs I think). The way you describe the modifiers you used sound a good way to go, but I think you could probably add more hairs and also play a bit more with those modifiers. You can also use more than one hair mesh to create the hair, if you need to do some specific effects, like more of those uncombed hairs you've already been adding.

[Destrega]

Hi Cem, thanks, yeah I already unchecked Speed up. I think now I got a bit better results, what do you think? Im only wondering what is wrong with the hair elements...I have the root object made from the original girl model, so just the needed parts of the head detached. Then I have 3 omni lights in the scene, and they all got hair shadows on, and n objects shadow maps. But on the render elements there is only a small shadow on the root object to see, and when I use all other methods, like all shadows, object shadows, hair shadows, it is completely black...
ALso, how do I get very soft shadows on the hair and objects, like light emitted from a plane as it is done in Vray...With default max lights I only get hard shadows on the hair casted from the head, but this is unnatural to the very soft shadows casted from the vray light of the head alter in comp....
So here are the new updates, I also bought myself a license as well, so that I could render it at home on my i7 980 extreme. Its so much faster than on my work:) On my quad at work I render for a frame 18 min, and on my i7 3:40. Also in the material settings, I completely removed the multiscatter effect and the transmittance, the hair gets totally blown out, already by very low light intensities...it is very hard to control the correct look, especially with blonde hair, cause it is often very near to white. So by disabling it, it was looking better^^

[cem]

The latest results look really nice. At this point I'd recommend that you carefully observe some reference photos and see how and where some hair strands deviate from the general hair flow. Getting this right would make your hair model very realistic. Once you know what exactly it is you need to do, figuring out a way to get it done with Hair Farm is easy.

The shadow render element can look completely black, it is normal. You should check out the alpha channel.

I wouldn't recommend using omni lights unless you really need them. Yes, Hair Farm's shadow maps are highly optimized for omni lights, but still you would get better control with spot or directional lights.

You can determine the softness of the shadow map using the filter parameter. If you'd like to get really realistic shadows, you should use Hair Farm's ray traced shadows. Hair Ray Traced Shadows also permit area shadows; all you need to do is to set the area light size. The area shadow computation of Hair Farm is extremely optimized, but keep in mind that area shadows still take a while to compute.

As for multiple scattering, if you'd like to get realistic results, I'd recommend keeping it on. If the hair comes out too bright, you can make the hair color darker to compensate for that.