Hair and Fur with ART Renderer

[Anonymous]

Finally moving my exterior architectural scenes over to 2017.  The ART renderer is nice and quick, but I am having a problem with the Hair and Fur, which I use for grass planes.  With the ART renderer, each strand of hair renders at a uniform thickness with only the applied material for color.  While this looks okay with a nice texture map applied, each strand looks like spaghetti rather than hair/blades of grass.  The ART renderer seems to completely ignore any of the material properties (tip/root color) and root/tip thickness.  I've attempted creating brand new planes native in 2017, and am using the buffer rendering option.  Any suggestions, or steps I'm missing here?

[Anonymous]

if you turn on Display As Geometry (at bottom), you'll see they are.........extruded Boxes...hence spaghetti like. Don't think you can blame just ART tho.

Try other renderers and you'll see spaghetti too. I think only scanline works and of course MR works with mr prim (I think ?)...also think from mem

vray works with mr prim too....can't be sure...

But the solution is, create a flat plane, narrow the top, bend it nicely.....then use this in Instance Node.

Now your blade of grass is flat, not tubular....I think you forfeit mr materials with this approach...but...ehh...create your own hair/grass material.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous and welcome to the community, 

I'd like to help with this.  First, @Anonymous has some excellent advice here that is worth trying.  I tried to repro this behavior and I was unable to do so.  Can you please try to render the attached file and let me know if it's still malfunctioning?  Also, which service pack/update are you currently on?  

Do you have multiple Hair and Fur's in your scene?  I'm trying to figure out why this is happening to you.  Would it be possible to share just the grass plane saved out with "Save Selected" and post it here?  Or, I can create a private folder if you'd like.  Thanks!

Best Regards,

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

I just wanted to follow up here, any progress on this issue?

Best Regards,

[Darkness999]

Any news about it?

[Anonymous]

I have the same problem with ART in v2019.   As you'll see when using your max file -- the only thing I changed was root and tip to exaggerate (blue root, white tip) -- the rendering with ART uses the object color, or physical material color if I assign one.   You'll see the displayed colors look like root and tip.

In my case I was using a clear material with Arnold to make a scalp mesh segment over a complete BIPED body mesh invisible, with mr prim & Arnold hair (etc) but was running into Arnold rendering problems, so want to return to my preferred ART renderer.    The problem in my case is that I do not want the scalp (mesh with hair modifier) to render as the hair color -- I want it to render as scalp skin color, so assigning a material color to the hair mesh object is not a solution.

[Anonymous]

a better screencap: