This page provides information on V-Ray's support for hair systems in Maya.
Overview
There are many internal and external tools for creating hair systems available in Maya. Most of them are supported in V-Ray, but there are a few things to keep in mind when rendering them. This page includes details to hopefully provide you with the best possible results.
V-Ray Fur
Our fur system is a way of procedurally generate strands with a few simple editing capabilities. It doesn't have the full hair simulation capabilities of more advanced systems, but it's useful for quickly adding a fur effect on top of a mesh, and it's included as part of V-Ray. For more details on the settings available for adjusting V-Ray Fur, please see the Procedural Fur (VRayFur) page.
Maya Hair
Changes to Maya hair are supported in IPR in both CPU and GPU modes, as well as changes to materials. A V-Ray Hair Material can be used for shading Maya Hair by connecting it as a hair shader in the V-Ray Extra Attributes applied to the hairSystemShape node.
XGen
The new Interactive Groomable Splines available in Maya 2017 are supported in V-Ray 3.5. Saved Grooms can be loaded and rendered with V-Ray using XGen Delta Files.
Limitations
- Changes to the geometry are not seen in a running IPR session, but everything else works in both CPU and GPU modes.
- The default material for XGen – hairPhysicalShader is not supported by V-Ray, but assigning a V-Ray material to them is an easy workaround. Note: This is not unique to Interactive Groomable Splines - all XGen spline collections have a hairPhysicalShader set as default.
- If using "GL Legacy" in Viewport 2.0, V-Ray materials cause the hair to disappear in the viewport. The hair still renders fine, but it is just not visible in the viewport.
Ornatrix
There are no known issues between Ornatrix and V-Ray, and the latest version should work fine. That includes rendering with the GPU engine and in IPR. V-Ray materials can be applied normally.
Ornatrix also includes the ability to generate a mesh from strands, rather than hair curves. Because of this, the geometry is rendered as a normal mesh, rather than as hairs. So the way the hair looks is different when using this mode because hair strands are rendered by V-Ray as smooth cylinders, while the generated mesh can be one of several shapes, including pyramidal strands or flat strips. When using flat strands, you can set them up to have UV coordinates per strand and map a texture across the strand, which is not possible when using hair curves. Please refer to the Ornatrix documentation on the various ways you can set up rendering and texturing hair with Ornatrix. Finally, when using a mesh, edits to the geometry will be reflected in IPR. However only the generated preview geometry will be rendered after the first edit.
Limitations
- Changes made to the hair geometry are not reflected in IPR.
- Attaching a texture as a width map is currently unsupported.
Shave and a Haircut
Shave and a Haircut is supported in V-Ray, and you can apply V-Ray materials to a Shave node just like you would to any other Maya node.
Limitations
There is currently no GPU support for Shave nodes.
Shave nodes don't appear when using IPR. To render in the IPR you can execute the shaveVrayPreRender MEL command before starting IPR and then shaveVrayPostRender after closing IPR. Also, any changes you make to the hair while IPR is open won't be reflected. This of course doesn't include V-Ray materials connected to the Shave node; changes made to them are reflected in IPR.