Hi Guys,

Here's our latest work using hairfarm. We did both a Kangaroo and polar bear. Both at 6000px tall.






Hope you like them, any questions just ask away

Regards,

Mark

Flawless! Great Job! Any animations ?

Hopefully they are in the pipeline anishmations! they are all setup so the basemesh can just be animated and the haircaps will follow, we just need to find some downtime!

Thanks for the kind words.

Great work! Thanks for posting them here!

These look great.
Could you please expand on your rendering and lighting pipeline? Which renderer, passes, etc.?

Hi Rotem, thanks for the comments.

Lighting:

With regards lighting we try to keep it simple. Generally a classic 3/4 point lighting setup will give you a good result out of the box so to speak. When the need calls for it, we will create a "light dome" to fake a GI look.

You create a hemisphere of spot lights, with lowish shadow map resolutions for speed, and then create a dome around your subject firing light at it from all sides. Around 16 lights is a good number. They are very low intensity but can really help sell the render. If in doubt though, keep it simple.

Rendering:

In terms of render passes, you have to get a bit creative due to the fact that hairfarm is basically an atmospheric so its not like doing multi-pass compositing whereby you can rebuild it lateron. We use Vray and it has some shaders which can help you out.

Normals pass - You can use the Vray Sampler Info shader and set it to normals to give you a normals pass for the hair. This is great for relighting. I posted a link on the chaos group forums about how to use it as shown below. You can also recreate this shader using falloffs with 3ds max standard materials.



Colour correction - We also create a few colour correction passes. You can map the root to tip of the hair with pure red and pure blue for example and this will allow you to create masks in comp to darken or lighten these areas.

Occlusion - We create a very fake occlusion by just mapping white at the tips and black at the roots and making the shader 100% self illuminated. If you don't have a heavy scene you can convert to geometry and do a proper occlusion but often this isn't viable.

We have been recently experimenting with Krakatoa as a volumetric renderer and the results are really promising as it just slots into the pipeline right after hairfarm. It has a great inbuilt look and it also implements the shader they used on King Kong for the hair which looks great.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Mark

thats a lot of cool info there. Thanks for sharing!
Any possibility of sharing any info abt the shader they used on KingKong?

Here you go

http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/news/20 ... art-1.html
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/news/20 ... art-2.html
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/news/20 ... art-3.html

This basically tells you how to utilize Krakatoa with Hairfarm. Essentially, use hairfarm as you would normally, to do all your sculpting and grooming of the hair, then when it comes to the rendering you convert your hair to splines and plug that into krakatoa. Krakatoa is a bit daunting at first as its much more technical but by just following the links above it will give you a good understanding of how to control the hair. Remember we are only really using it for shading and lighting.

The great thing about this approach is that you get all the awesome modelling tools of hairfarm and the control that gives you plus the super fast, highly detailed rendering of krakatoa. The render times are much faster too.

With regards the shader, its natively built into krakatoa, i think its called the Marschner model. You can see Bobo talking about it here, this is an extract from the links above.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbD15qly ... ded#t=376s

If i can find the animated test i will put it up for you guys.

Cheers,

Mark

Here's the Animated Krakatoa test i did. This is a very quick proof of concept just to make sure the pipeline worked. Neither of the above renders where done with this approach as this was done for another job.



This is really only scraping the surface of what the two products can do so there's lots of improvements to be made but what i really like about the look is that the grass actually has a density to the shadows which atmospherics often lack.

Anyhow, you can easily achieve this test by just following the video tutorials above.

Cheers,

Mark

Thanks for all the info, look interesting!

Wow, I'm having problems believing that polar bear is 3D. It looks absolutely stunning! Can you show a viewport grab of it?

Hey Supperune,

Thanks for the kinds words, im a huge fan of your work on the troll hunter, great job!

Here's some screenshots of the guides, the polar bear model, and also the lighting setup which i outlined in a previous post using the GI dome.

Credit for the modelling of the bear goes to Nico Domerego - http://cargocollective.com/nicodomerego/249510

Impressive results, specially on the bear, 100% real.

I'm curious about the render times of that GI dome, that's something I considered doing sometimes, but I wasn't sure the result was worth the render times. Does that add a lot of render time?

Thanks Woody, i have learnt an awful lot from your posts on here so your words are much appreciated.

A lot of our work is for print so we deal with renders that are 6k + at a minimum so the kind of gains the GI dome gives you are definitely worth it. For smaller resolutions, i would say not so much, however, if you can spare the overhead it can give you an edge.

Generally, i use shadow maps of around 256px for the GI dome lights so they don't take a great deal of time to calculate but it does add up when you start pumping hairs into the scene. The higher the resolution the better of course.

From recollection, at 6k this frame might have taken around 2-3 hours i think.

Based on my work with Krakatoa though it negates the need for the GI dome because you get that look automatically so i think this is the way we will go in the future.

Great work like the clumping in the fur!

I bow in respect - totally awesome!