anyway to reduce ram useage with hair?

so I am fairly new to blender, less then 300 hours. but I came prepared with a good system. I have a 1700x, paired with 24gb of ram (16+8gb this will be 32 soon) now the issue that I am having is that I am doing aanthropomorphic art aka furry stuff right now. the issue I am having is that hair is taking up extreme amounts of ram. all of it in fact.



doing things like busts is fine, however the big issue I run into is trying to do a whole shot with a scene with just one model,

however with scenes like this. took up to 21 gigs of ram when building bvh. not very ideal, plus with it only being one model and the hair nerfed down to a point where it isn’t visible, which isn’t what I wanted.

so do you guys have any tips on how to improve this please?

the fur in those images isn’t really clear… to me it seems a little excessive to use ACTUAL fur when a shader effect could suffice. you could pair a furry shader effect (meaning literally that… an effect) with a light hair particle system using interpolated children… this should give a similar effect to the images above but shouldn’t require ALL the RAMS…

either way, for the overall visual you’re getting above it seems like insane overkill to have so many hair particles that will barely be seen. like in the second shot it’s basically impossible to tell that there’s a fur system at all. I would personally use textured hair and a displacement map to get the effect you have above.

can I ask the composition of the particle effects you have… like, how many different particle systems and how many individual particles in each?

on the case of “reducing RAM use” make sure the fur is as cheap as possible… for example when using very short fur like this there’s no point in using a crazy number of divisions on each particle. you could literally have 1 as the path steps. make sure Bspline is turned off, and make sure the shader noodle that’s attached to the hair system(s) are pretty lightweight. and please make sure the modifier stack is in the right order you don’t want to be creating a crazy particle system on top of a high resolution subdivision modifier (that’s a surefire way to waste a LOT of RAM.)