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Hair rendered with Maxwell. Image courtesy of Mihai Iliuta |
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Maxwell Render uses the MaxwellHair.mxx procedural primitive to be able to read fur and hair fibers (generated by Shave&Haircut, Maya Hair, Ornatrix, etc) and render them without the need to convert the fibers into triangles. Skipping the need of converting millions of fibers into triangles allows you to save a huge amount of space in memory, and reduces the size of the scene files, saving space in disk and transfer time.
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- Softimage Hair from Softimage
- Cinema Hair from Cinema4D
Generating fur using Shave&Haircut in Maya
You can setup the fur/hair by using density maps, and adjusting the root radius and tip radius, as well as frizz, kink or other styling effects, depending on the capabilities of your fur/hair generator. Maxwell renders the fur/hair with full global illumination, and all other realistic lighting effects, providing a very natural look.
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Animal fur rendered with the MaxwellHair extension |
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Hair segmentsThe number of segments of each fiber can affect the render performance. In general terms, keep in mind these rules:
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Applying a Maxwell Material
To get the maximum control over the look you have to apply a Maxwell Material to the fur/hair. Because most of the realistic look of the hair comes from the accurate shading of Maxwell Render, a simple Maxwell material is usually enough, for example composed of two BSDFs: one to indicate the color of the fur/hair, and another to add certain shininess. A metallic material mixed with a diffuse one can also work well. Additionally you have great control over the texturing both along the strand length and across the roots (see below).
Mapping the Fur/Hair
In most situations you may need to define the color of the fur/hair using maps. Maxwell Render recognizes two UV channels:
- UV Channel = 0, a map that is applied to the longitudinal dimension of each fiber, to define different colors along the fiber, from root to tip.
- UV Channel = 1, a map that is applied across the surface of the furry object, to define different colors at different areas.
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A gradient map applied on the UV Channel = 0, provides different colors along the fur fiber.
The root-to-tip texture is read vertically (only the first column matters)
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A color map applied on the UV Channel = 1, provides different colors across the surface. The map values are assigned regarding the surface UVs
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Keep in mind that the surface mapping (channel 1) depends completely on the capability to transfer the UVs from the surface to the fiber by the hair generator. Some hair generators, like Maya PaintFX does not transfer the surface UVs to the fibers, so they could not use this surface mapping feature. |
See the Texturing hair and fur page in the Material examples - How To section (Knowledgebase) for a description about materials for hair.
Fur Tutorial (in 3DSMax)
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/wiki/spaces/knfaq/pages/5479215
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Image and tutorial courtesy of Jerome Denis |
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