@eversimo, thanks. If I can find the time I’ll try to show some material settings (and particle settings I guess?), but for now I’d advise to look for Andy’s different posts about the fur rendering and grooming you can find on the Big Buck Bunny blog.
I have to disagree with you. The strand thickness, shading and colors make this very unrealistic. For a better comparison here’s a more realistic hair render (added to the first post).
Personally I prefer the non-photo realistic one, because of the slightly Dali-ish look.
Both hairs are really great! Apart from material and particle settings, i’m also interested in the lighting setup, since that’s one third of what makes hair look good.
It’s too bad that the strand renderer can’t work with anything raytraced, I always use SSS for realistic hair as a result.
We have the new strand renderer and sky/atmosphere system, but they don’t work with raytracing, at least the volume renderer works with it otherwise I would say the devs. outside of Matt Ebb and Farsthary don’t care about raytracing and its realism benefits at all.
Perhaps you’re depending so much on raytracing and SSS that you forget there are other ways to get the results. And sometimes we NEED these other ways. Especially for animation, optimizing render time is essential.
What is it that you want with your hair renders? Do you want realistic hair, or do you want to use SSS?
Just like AAO, the strand rendering needs a lot of tweaking. I believe I can be quite satisfied with the Blond hairball test, since it took me only 10 minutes to set up and 20 minutes to tweak (test rendering included). If I would spend another 30 minutes on more tweaking, increase some settings, I’m sure I could have great looking hair in HD with render times under 5 minutes.
On a side note, if I would want my hair to look like thick red liquorish, like your 17 hour render, I might have a problem.
Because it doesn’t use a material to make it look like human hair or animal fur. Blender hair particles are used for artificial surfaces too, I used a reflective and refractive material on top of that.
Don’t assume people only make organic hair material with hair particles.
@Jeepster, nothing specific. Just some research. During BBB it was Andy who did all the fur, and unfortunately I didn’t always had the time to look over his shoulder. The BBB files and some of Andy’s blog posts are very helpful though.
