2008

Hair Rendering Options group
Hairs Sets the method to be used for rendering hair:
■ buffer (The default) Procedural hair generated by Hair at render time
based on the modifier parameters. Buffer hair is generated by a special
renderer within Hair and offers the benefit of being able to create millions
of hairs with minimal memory requirements. Only one hair is in memory
at a time. Also, using Buffer render offers a variety of compositing options
(described below).
■ geometry Creates actual geometry for the rendered hair at render time.
This geometry is assigned the material ID set by the Hair And Fur modifier
>
Geom Mat ID parameter on page 1097 .
NOTE “Geometry” hair derives its texture from the growth object, not from
any maps applied via the Material Parameters rollout.
Compositing options aren't available with “geometry” hair.
The “geometry” option works with both the default scanline renderer and
the mental ray renderer.
■ mr prim Hair is generated by a procedural mental ray shader that
generates mental ray curve primitives directly into the mental ray rendering
stream at render time.
Choose this option only when you are rendering hair with the
mental ray
renderer
on page 6039 .
mr Voxel Resolution Available only for the “geometry” and “mr prim” Hairs
options. At render time, hair boundaries are subdivided into volume cubes or
“voxels.” 3ds Max calculates which hairs are in each voxel, and when a ray
enters a voxel, it calculates for those hairs. This allows unneeded voxels to be
removed from memory during calculation.
With “geometry” rendering, voxels are used only for calculating instanced
hairs.
This value gives the resolution of the subdivision. For example, a value of 3
subdivides the volume into 3 x 3 x 3 voxels, for a total of 27. The higher this
value, the more efficient calculations can be. Default=5.
Lighting
■ native (The default.) Uses standard 3ds Max calculations for light falloff.
6388 | Chapter 19 Effects and Environments