ikkiz In reply to Vir-Norin [2014-03-01 11:03:27 +0000 UTC]

I have no any idea how does fibermesh works. Zbrush is a terrifying piece of software for me.
Everything I have done is done in Blender, including for sculpting of both characters too.
I can't tell, you how much it differs in zbrush.
The amount of hair you see on Jill and Unicorn ... My PC can handle it easily, however I was not able to render everything on my 1GB GPU, I had to switch to CPU.
Unfortunately I was not able to cover all the body of unicorn with hairs. It required too many short and thick hair over all body, and insane amount of RAM.  I have 8GB of RAM.

Blender has special "comb mode" You just adding and combing hair parents for hair children to follow, and you get nice strands of hair. Cycles has A new hair BSDF node, with two closure options: transmission and refraction. You can mix those shaders with other shaders in node editor. Blender hair rendering is really sweet. But t be honest, blender is not easy software to learn.

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Vir-Norin In reply to ikkiz [2014-03-01 11:47:10 +0000 UTC]

It is sad to hear that Cycles has some problems with RAM when it comes to rendering fur. That's probably one of the nifty things in mental ray - its ability to render a lot of geometry without having memory problems. My RAM is only half of yours but I'm able to render fur easily. 

Oh, thanks for answering about Blender Hair. Looks like it works the same way as in older versions - parent curves guiding the children strands.  Fibermesh is really awesome since every fiber is unique which means more detailed hair. The only thing making me stay with Maya is a good compatibility between Zbrush and Maya's hair systems - importing Fibermesh curves and grow the hair along them is a straightforward and simple process. Though Maya's hair shader really sucks.

PS no worries about Blender. I'm using it every day for almost five years. Along with Zbrush this is my favorite software. I switched to Maya only for rendering since when I started learning 3D there were no renderers for Blender suited for rendering skin while also being able to provide indirect lighting and other nice stuff. 

PPS I don't find Blender hard to learn at all IMHO it is far superior and straightforward in many aspects compare to Maya or Max (starting with UI, navigation and finishing with modeling toolkit... though cannot speak about stuff like animation since I don't know too much about it)

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ikkiz In reply to Vir-Norin [2014-03-01 12:40:24 +0000 UTC]

I wouldn't call this problems with RAM 
I have rendered the Island Scene containing 19 billion (19 000 000 000) triangles. The scene used only 200MB of memory and required 40 minutes to render in Cycles. Try it by yourself, .blend is included on blendswap blenderartists.org/forum/showt…
But it was achieved by duplication, I could not use duplication for fur, becase every strand is a separate piece of geometry. Moreover my scene is heavy due to textures (2X 4k for Jill, 2x 3k for unicorn, 2k for rocks, equirectagular enviroment map).
Horse fur is just as thick as human hair, but, you know ... horse is bigger than human head. I cant remember exact number of hairs that crashed blender, but it was a lot of hair. 1/3 cover was ok, but thhe I have added more, and blender srashed i.imgur.com/lhBXiqO.jpg

Every children could be unique too. There are a lot of settings guiding childrens, roughtness, clump, shape, parting ... and some kinks for braid, wave, curl,. Try it by yourself.
You can easly benchmark blender fur on your PC. Add sphere, tap space, type quick fur, and then setup number of hair. Try how much blender is capable to render for you, but mind that, there is posible to render a lot more than is posible to display in viewport.

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Vir-Norin In reply to ikkiz [2014-03-01 13:29:42 +0000 UTC]

Do you mean Instancing when talking about duplication? Meaning a lot of duplicated objects sharing the same shape node (just clarifying a proper term)? If so - yeah, there is a same thing in mental and Vray designed to render heavy scenes. Speaking about fur - there is a cool option called mental proxies: you can export very dense object to .ma file and allow renderer to call only needed chunks of it during rendering. Dunno how it works exactly but saves a lot of memory too. Though I'm not using it since for now everything works fine

Yeah, I will try this scene to be familiar how far Cycles can get on my machine. Thanks.

Yes, I totally understand your issue with a complex scene full of high-res textures and possible RAM problems. Right now I'm creating environment for my centaur girl so in addition I have a lot of grass, plants, trees volumetrics etc eating my memory considerable. And all this stuff should be textured too. So every megabyte counts and should be used wisely. Probably I will render my scene in passes and merge everything in Photoshop. Hence a question: if you are able to cover only third of the horse's body, why not create three renders with different patches of hair and then simply blend everything in PS? Or is there some technical nuances making this method not possible?

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ikkiz In reply to Vir-Norin [2014-03-01 14:41:25 +0000 UTC]

Yes I meant instancing. Of course I could separate hair to few particle systems, render them one by one using render layers and compose them in blender compositor (without PS - I don't like PS, I prefer nodes), but my original aim was to make anisotropic shader which woluld mimic short horse hair laying flat on skin. I've prepare "flow map" texture, to indicate hair direction here is result: ikkiz.pl/portfolio/var/albums/… It is not so visible on final render and white horse, but I didn't really want to cover it with fur. It was only experiment.

Moreover I like to do one more experiment with using instancing as fur.
If you instancing one  blade of grass, say of 10 triangles 1 000 000 times, you have 1M grass blades, 10M triangles - blender probably will crash.
But if you prepare a patch of grass blades containing 1000 x 10 triangles  and you multiply it by 1000 instances it is 10000*1000 =10M but blender can handle it easly ... up to bilions! It's not very intuitive, but thats how it works. I wonder if I could make fur this way - I have to try use object or group instead of strand in hair particle system.

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Vir-Norin In reply to ikkiz [2014-03-01 16:57:39 +0000 UTC]

Oh, yes, I totally forget about anisotropy effect caused by specific hair layout in horses. 

This is interesting and a bit odd behavior. I'm speaking about instancing in Blender. I will take it into account for sure when I will do my own rendering tests in a future. Thanks again. I will wait to see new updates from you

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ikkiz In reply to mardraq [2013-07-03 09:10:39 +0000 UTC]

Smacznego. W końcu się to nazywa Dewiant Art - nie?

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ikkiz In reply to oykux [2013-06-02 20:01:41 +0000 UTC]

I keep my fingers crossed for you. I do not know much about Turkey. To be honest, I thought that Turkey is an Islamic state. I thought that you wear funny clothes that men wear beards and women conceal their hair.
I'm so sorry for that.
But I saw pictures of young people dressed like us in Poland, fighting for freedom in the clouds of poison gas, as Poles fought for their freedom in the eighties.
I saw a beautiful girls with uncovered hair courageously confronting the against police. Unfortunately one of them was lying dead in a pool of blood. It broke my heart. I hope that there will be no victims, and the Turks will get the freedom that belongs to every human being.

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oykux In reply to ikkiz [2013-06-02 21:47:42 +0000 UTC]

You are not %100 wrong. Many Turkish people are Muslims even though any religion is not specified in the constitution. There is also a considerable amount of women who conceals their hair and men who wears bears. They are not the majority but they are still many of them. And our prime minister and the ruling party is one of them.
We aren't only protesting our park being destroyed but we are also protesting the ruling party because of their attitude these past years calling Ataturk "drunk", not letting us celebrate our national holidays, not caring about terror and martyrs, trying to forbid alcohol and abortion and many other stuff...
As you can guess, a large percentage of the overly-religious people are supporting the ruling party so they can't be seen in the protests too much. But still there are a significant amount of religious people suppoting the protest, but they are not the ones supporting the ruling party.
And again, than you for your support. And thank you for your hopes.

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ikkiz In reply to Joe-Roberts [2013-01-27 10:46:27 +0000 UTC]

In fact, this painting is great concept for 3d. If I only had more time...

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