[Question about Iray Shader] Hair shader

Nathy Design

Hello !

I search many advices about hair shaders for Iray. Not for 3D meshes but for hair to create with fibermesh.

Best regard

Toyen

Just try to experiment with the shader and you´ll eventually get the look : )

Iray does not have hair specific shader, at least not in DS (don´t know about the other plugins, for maya or max for example), so you really need to experiment to get the hair look.

What you can do is take a look at how hair shaders work in other render engines that do have them and try to mimic those settings.

For example, here is how the specularity of the hair shader works in the Arnold Renderer : https://support.solidangle.com/display/AFMUG/Hair+-+Specular

I think this might be the most important part about the hair shader because you want to get that specular part just right.

For hair I would go for specular mixing option but it´s hard to tell what will work best since I´ve never needed to create a hair shader in DS.

It´s not very useful for polygon hair and I never used any other type of hair or hair systems in DS.

Maybe someone can help more : )

The Blurst of Times

I tend to use the Plastic Glossy shader, then add translucency to the different Surfaces. Wisps and Ends get a lot more translucency than Caps.

I know others have experimented with the Wax shaders because of the translucent effect. I just use Plastic Glossy for ease of use, and then I dial in translucency afterwards.

Nathy Design

I would like to texture hair but i have many difficults with them and Iray….

It is for Hair as Aminata hair created with fibermesh.

Oso3D

I've experimented a lot. What I've found is certain approaches tend to work better with certain color hair.

For example, some metallic-style shaders work great for very light blond hair and red hair, but terrible for black hair. Other approaches work great for black or dark brown, but terrible for others, etc.

Daikatana

I am currently experimenting with adding displacement maps to the cutout opacity channel but not changing the cutout opacity settings. It seems to work on some things but not others. Don't ask me why or how.

Oso3D

One thing that's worked well is putting very fine hair maps (loosely parallel black and white lines, basically) in displacement map, up horizontal tiling on just that map to 64 or so.

So it creates a sense of fine hairs within the cutout shape.