Adventures with Hair

Finally got some hair on my character! I was able to create his hairstyle using fibermesh in Zbrush, then export the curves to Maya to use as a base for creating an nHair system. Right now I have a working render in mental ray using the default hair shader, so next step is to explore other hair shading options in mental ray, and of course, get the hair working and shaded in v-ray, arnold and renderman RIS. 

nHair rendered with Mental Ray

PBR resource, plus a cool idea :)

Found this nice work up on physically based materials. He covers a lot of topics and provides links to where he gets some of his information. Not all of it will be relevant to what I am doing with my character, but since I am delving into some aspects of physically based rendering, this could be a good resource for parts of my paper.

"Physically Based Rendering Encyclopedia" by Brian Yu

Also, I really loved the way he displayed his material layering on one of his example renders - showing each material used on a sphere so that you can see its characteristics more clearly. This would be a great way to show the difference in how each render engine's native shaders handle different materials. While it may be difficult to see on a character because of added details, shadows, etc, having the spheres as well makes it very easy to see any difference in how the material renders/responds to light.

Render by Brian Yu

Finally!! Free Renderman!!

Opened my email to this beautiful site the other day :-D

Then today, I found this handy tutorial that goes over some basics of rendering using the new RIS structure -

http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/pixar-renderman-automobile-rendering-in-ris/

Obviously I'm not the only one excited about the new Renderman :-)