well, if it's a financial issue - get 3delight. You can use it for free with
some number-of-cores limitation, that still makes it awesome at a lot of
things were MR isnt. Hair in particular being one of those.
For me, a huge issue with hair in XSI/MR is the normals. The hair primitive
is done as a flat ribbon, for decent light interaction it should be a
cylinder. (which is what 3delight does - or is it a cone? anyway not a flat
ribbon)
You can have cylinder like normals with a custom shader (if you write it
yourself it's 'free', if you have someone write it for you this could end up
more expensive that a renderlicense - so that's not very feasible).
You can make things a bit better (just a bit) with a gradient on the hair
(black white black - crosswise) as a bump. This will give you somewhat
better normals. But you will need very decent sampling for this to really
matter - and decent sampling with hair in MR is going to be painful.
There's a couple of (out of the box) things that can improve hair rendering
in MR - shadowmapped lights and the rasterizer in particular jump to mind.
But don’t expect miracles either.
...
-----Original Message-----
From: Leendert A. Hartog
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2014 1:16 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: realistic hair shading SI-MR
Okay, this was intended as a thread with a serious question about hair
shading in MR,
but it's turned into a Redshift infomercial. ;)
If I had the funds at my disposal, I already would have bought it.
Ah, well, a bald human head definitely is an artistic statement too.
Greetz
Leendert
--
Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue
Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com
