Speeding up Rendering Hair

hermun81

Is there a quick and easy way of lowering the definition of Hair items to make them render faster in 3DL?

With a few of the Hair items I have the scene renders perfectly well before it "jams" on someone's hair for an hour, before continuing to render at the original speed...

Richard Haseltine

Ray-traced shadows and occlusion through transparency-mapped surfaces are slow, and hair typically has several overlapping layers of mesh with transparency. One fix, if you have uberSurface or uberHair applied, is to turn off occlusion and optionally to turn off shadow casting for the hair, then in the latter case load a second copy of the hair, remove its opacity maps, apply uberSurface, and turn Phantom on for all surfaces (I think that's the right setting) - that will generate shadows, albeit from the crude mesh shape, without the overhead of opacity.

hermun81

Did you mean subSurface?  I found everything else on the surface tab, but not uberSurface.

Richard Haseltine

uberSurface is a shader - look in (as I recall) Shader Presets>omnifreaker>uberSurface for the preset to apply it to selected surfaces.

hermun81

I don't seem to have omnifreaker.  I found a list of things under that name in the DAZ store.  Do I need one of them to make this work?

Richard Haseltine

No, uberSurface is part of the Default Resources pack that comes with DS so you should have it,. uberHair is a separate purchase.

hermun81

Tried your advice, it doesn't seem to make much difference.  I noticed that the render also seems to "jam" at random point on the wall or on a prop that normally doesn't cause a problem, so I don't know for sure that the hair is the issue.

Any further advice?

Richard Haseltine

Perhaps if you post the scene file, with a note of the content used, someone may be able to help.