About hair in DS these days

Choppski

Been away from rendering for a while and now getting back into it, but I am currently still using DS 4.10 for a variety of reasons including that I know it works on my older rendering computer. But I keep reading about hair and Daz3D’s strand-based hair system. Is that different than fibermesh? Is it more resource intensive? My computer can't really do dforce and fibermesh pushes it to the limit. Also, I mostly render in 3dl (so I can have more than one figure in a scene). I DO use the other hairs on those rare occasions when I use iray, but iray has to use regular memory cuz my video card is so minimal. ANyway, mostly interested in the new hairs that use Daz3D’s strand-based hair system, and whether a) they are more resource intensive than fibermeach (or if they are just fibermesh) and b) can they bused in 3dl?

Richard Haseltine

Strand-based hair (and dForce hair) use actual lines for haird, most fibremesh hair is imported as narrow strips. (though the stand based hair has to be baked to strips for Iray at the moment.) Strand based hair has a (usually) limited number of guide hairs which are styled, and in the case of dForce hair can be simulated, then at render time extra hairs are interpolated between the guides to give a full density - as a result there can be a lot of geomentry sent to the renderer, though how much is configurable.

Choppski

Richard Haseltine said:

Strand-based hair (and dForce hair) use actual lines for haird, most fibremesh hair is imported as narrow strips. (though the stand based hair has to be baked to strips for Iray at the moment.) Strand based hair has a (usually) limited number of guide hairs which are styled, and in the case of dForce hair can be simulated, then at render time extra hairs are interpolated between the guides to give a full density - as a result there can be a lot of geomentry sent to the renderer, though how much is configurable.

So it uses memory? Worse than fibermesh? Can it be used in 3DL renders?

Richard Haseltine

Choppski said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Strand-based hair (and dForce hair) use actual lines for haird, most fibremesh hair is imported as narrow strips. (though the stand based hair has to be baked to strips for Iray at the moment.) Strand based hair has a (usually) limited number of guide hairs which are styled, and in the case of dForce hair can be simulated, then at render time extra hairs are interpolated between the guides to give a full density - as a result there can be a lot of geomentry sent to the renderer, though how much is configurable.

So it uses memory? Worse than fibermesh? Can it be used in 3DL renders?

Whether it's worse than fibremesh will dpend on the hair sets involved, imported fibremesh hair can be pretty heavy itself though the need to have the whole mesh in memory at all times, as opposed to strand-based hair's render-time interpolation, may limit what creators do.

Yes, 3delight can use Strand based hair though its material options are not the same.