In my current wip as I adjusted the strand sizes to give the best result for a beard and feathers, I noticed that the actual rendered thickness of the hair is dependent on the pixel dimension used for displaying the hair.
That means for lower target render resolution or the object being farther away, the hair becomes thicker and shinier.
See below 3 images of a feather with the only difference being the target resolution of 2048, 1024 and 512 pixels resp. All images were then scaled to the same dimension to be comparable. As you can see, the renders are quite different.
Why has no one paid any attention to this? This is a serious problem. Unless there’s already a way around it that I don’t know about.
I’ve recently created a model with lots of thick hair/fur – which looks great in all of my lower resolution preview renders. But when I do a full quality, high resolution render, all the strands are a lot thinner than in the lower resolution renders. I can see right through to his skin, with a TON of space to spare! This is bad. I’d have to multiply the number of strands I have by 3 or 4 to fill up the gaps, not to mention that it would look completely ridiculous having millions of microscopic sized hairs.
Sorry but that’s the way it is. There is a script floating around somewhere that will convert strands to meshes but I have never used it. You can probably expect to see some dramatic improvements in strand particles as a result of Project Peach but don’t hold your breath cuz that will probably be a long time from now. I’m fairly certain that the devs will become disgusted with the current strand implementation since they’re making a cute and fuzzy critter movie.
Great looking images! Unfortunately I don’t have an answer to this problem. In fact I have the same problem:
The grass further away from the camera should be thicker than the grass nearby. The only answer I thought of was to separate the particle-emitting-mesh in like four slices, one close to the camera, the others more and more away from the camera. Than make individual materials with more and more thin strands. If you are just working on a still, or an animation with limited movement (only wind like in my example) this works ok, but hopefully some genius developer can work on this.
