Coloring aiStandardHair with a texture map, but it has no shininess/roughness.

[Anonymous]

I'm coloring aiStandardHair (I'm doing a giraffe fur) with a texture map.

Plugging the map into anything other than Diffuse, gives a bad result (and Diffuse gives a great result!). However no amount of fiddling with the other specular settings gives any shininess to the hair. Literally no change occurs.

I know Diffuse is not physically accurate but again its the only one that works, and following the advice near the top here leads to bizarre renders.

Any thoughts on how to achieve shininess? I may just render two passes and composite, (and should also say I've watched all the top youtube tutorials hence why I'm here).

[lee_griggs]

Are you able to share some renders/screengrabs of shader settings?

I tested a checker texture connected to Base Color here:

[teddude75]

I used a mix shader for a panda. By using two different two hair shaders that combined with an alpha into a mix shader and that worked pretty good. That way I could control the IOR for the black fur and white fur separately. That could work for you. Also on a side note, texture maps like tigers, bears, and giraffes need to be adding to base color and set melanin set to 0. Diffuse is only for very dirty hair. Try using specular roughness to get accurate giraffe fur. You could also use melanin as a map (0=white, .5= light Brown, 1= Black). Also a ramp applied to the color can give you tip and root color.

TED

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply Lee - It's literally the simplest setup:

• An exported png plugged into the Base Color (as you've got here), and Melanin turned to 0.
• I've tried setting the file node to Raw, and Alpha is Luminance etc etc. I've flushed .tx caches etc.
• I've also tried plugging in a ramp, with two points (each with the above image).

Both cause literally no effect, and I was getting this error in the script editor:
# Error: line 1: RuntimeError: file <string> line 2: Maya command error #

I've tried with .png and .tga both exported from Substance.

[Anonymous]

Further to my last comment @Lee Griggs it does appear to work but because I'm doing short fur it's so faint to the point of barely being visible. Even when I bump the density up crazily high it seems to be pretty dull unfortunately.

Even bigger issue is the shininess on it - it coats the fur with a really dull overall shine that is borderline impossible to remove while maintaining any reasonably realistic look.

I've now spent 2 full days on it with no luck and am probably just going to leave it as it's clearly unsuitable for fur.