Hair and Fur in MAX 8

[Nuttyman54]

I noticed that the included MAX 8 tutorials are painfully sparse on animating with their new Hair and Fur WSM. I thought this would be a good place to share any information we learn about it. Here's what i've found out:

1) in order to render hair motion, you must precalculate it

2) hair collisions are PAINFULLY hard to do and require lots of guide splines

3) spacewarps such as wind are great tools for getting effects with hair, but they take quite a bit of tweaking to acheive the right effect

that's all i can think of right now. if anyone's figured out how to make the hair correctly collide with it's growth object, let me know!

-Nuttyman54

[Ryan Dognaux]

The hair and fur modifier is awesome, that was just on my first few attempts too so it's quite easy to create a picture with fur... but I'm sure animating with realism would be a whole different challenge.

[Nuttyman54]

ahh wait until you try animating...i can't get the fur to collide w/ the ground...or much anything else realistically

[Nimmy]

the rendering of the fur and hair is just a massive amount of details for our pc
we just got a new oen this year, and the hair and fur triple the time it takes
a 10sec clip one of the animation team did, with hair... of just a guy playing a piano, took about 8 hours, dosent matter how you split it
when it renders the hair and fur, it's just horrible

any thoughts or ways to reduce rendering time for hair and fur?
or just making the render itself quicker?
thanks in advance

[Ryan Dognaux]

Is there some way you can net render with multiple computers involved? If you have that capability, it would allow multiple machines to work on your render job and speed up the process.

Also, any less detail will mean lower render times. High quality stuff takes a long time unfortunately.

[Nimmy]

well we do have a network of 15 computers, even over 40 in the overall school network
, unfourtanetly we do not know how to hook the render up so it's all toghether working
with eachother
how do I do this?

[Ryan Dognaux]

I have personally never had to do a Net Render, so I'm not sure. But I found a site that hopefully will help you out: http://raven.cc.ku.edu/~acss/netrender/netrender.htm

Good luck

[Nuttyman54]

Max 8 ships with Backburner 3, which allows you to use up to 999 CPU's if they're all networked together..the limitation being that you've got one CPU crunching each frame, so if you've got 80 frames, it doesn't matter if you've got 80 CPU's or 800 CPU's, it'll still take the same amount of time.

As for reducing the render time, you can try reducing the number of hairs and increasing the number of hair passes by the same proportion. (IE reducing 9000 hairs with one pass to 3000 and 3 passes) Also, how many lights do you have illumination/shadow casting on the hair? It could help to exlude some of the lights from illuminating the hair, and using dedicated spotlights for the hair. Also, turn off shadow casting on any lights illuminating the hair, as it will drastically increase the render time. Hope that helps!

[stevek]

My experience in the past with collision objects, the more detail the objects the more accurate the collision will look- but that also increases the render time. So the more you want to cut back for rendering sake- the less realistic motion effects will look. (When I say detail, I mean segments and such- The computer will have more trouble calculating accurate collisions in a theoretical surface (ie the area between points). The accuracy comes when a vertex collides. I don't yet know the object creation parameters for the new Hair functions- but this is what its been like in the past doing - hair, toothbrush, grass, etc.

Net rendering is the way to go. If you have access to multiple computers, go for it. Of course it will render one frame per CPU! but that means it will simultaneously render that many frames as opposed to one at a time on one computer. When we first setup net rendering- it was taking us a few days to render our test animations- then we were able to run full resolution finals of our entire animation in one night (that included working late and starting early the next morning.) So we were able to run the entire thing in several hours instead of days.

[Capt.ArD]

that's what i did. 17634 strands. 5 passes. about 2 min. to render. no lights.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!111!!111!!!1!1!1

[Nuttyman54]

so has anyone (besides me) actually tried animating it yet? let me know how it goes...i'm still trying to get it to respond to wind correctly

[kcy88]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

Is there some way you can net render with multiple computers involved? If you have that capability, it would allow multiple machines to work on your render job and speed up the process.

Also, any less detail will mean lower render times. High quality stuff takes a long time unfortunately.

Indeed there is! If you enable Bucket Rendering with the Mental Ray renderer instead of using backburner, you can use up to 8 cpus on ONE frame not including the computer that is hosting the scene. It's a thrill to watch more than 1 bucket render, and even more exciting to watch 8. However, from my experience from working on the safety animation, bucket rendering is ideal for test renders and Backburner is ideal for rendering animation.

The most effective way to use bucket rendering is to have a fast network and computers that are equal in performance. It doesn't help you if you have one really slow cpu and one fast cpu.


If you need a guide on how to setup bucket rendering, let me know, I'd be glad to help.

[Capt.ArD]

Hey Nuttyman, Did you ever get it to work with wind?

link removed, see Mr. Fraggs' post

this is the video I made while messing around w/ hair. the first half is just the dude's head moving, the second half is movement due to wind. It really wasn't that hard, there are a few weird things that you have to tweak in the dynamics panel of the hair and fur modifier. It looks kinda unrealistic right now, but there are many things that i just cut corners on to save render time. It can be a LOT better.
SHout if ya'll still want help on figuring it out.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by kcy88

Indeed there is! If you enable Bucket Rendering with the Mental Ray renderer instead of using backburner, you can use up to 8 cpus on ONE frame not including the computer that is hosting the scene. It's a thrill to watch more than 1 bucket render, and even more exciting to watch 8. However, from my experience from working on the safety animation, bucket rendering is ideal for test renders and Backburner is ideal for rendering animation.

The most effective way to use bucket rendering is to have a fast network and computers that are equal in performance. It doesn't help you if you have one really slow cpu and one fast cpu.


If you need a guide on how to setup bucket rendering, let me know, I'd be glad to help.

I knew there was a way to do it, I was just wondering if their situation allowed them to do this. But excellent response nonetheless, I haven't set on up before so if I ever have to I'm definitley coming back to this thread.

[Mr.Fraggs]

hair test reaction video

tada