vbrabble wrote:My First Render from DAZ using Octane. Now I need to figure out what is going on with the hair. I am blown away with the realism though.
Any tips, guide or tutorials to optimum settings would be appreciated.
VB
Welcome to the Daz Octane forum
. Nice render. For the hair, look at the hair materials in the NGE (Octane Node editor). Looks like the hair has glossy materials. Look for
Index of refraction (controls how much light is reflected back) in the glossy material and see what it is set too. Value of 1 is like a mirror. I would say use a value of around 1.6 to 1.8. You can play around with the settings to control the highlight on you hair. Also look at the
Roughness setting. 0 Value will create concentrated highlights and the value of > 0 will start to spread the highlights. You can use your bump map here and then play with the power of it. Another setting to look at is the
Specular. This controls the intensity of the highlights. Play around with its value to see how it affects the hair. Higher the value the more the highlight intensity. You can also use a texture map or use RGB Value to change the color of the highlights.
Once you get familiar with the above settings, then you can explore using a specular material mixed with a diffuse material and glossy material to add SSS (sub surface scattering) to the hair to make it look more realistic. You will need to use the Medium node and add absorption to the Diffuse node and scattering to the specular node. You can turn on the Fake Shadows in the specular node otherwise your render will go on for a lot longer. You can search for tonysculptor hair (or just hair) in the LiveDB to get a start. The more you experiment with the settings the more you will know what effects what in the render.
One last thing, if you hair has many surfaces, you will need to do the adjustment for each of the surfaces. You can copy materials from one layer to the other, but you may need to change the diffuse / bump / opacity / specular / etc maps back to what they should be for that layer. Copying material will copy the current maps overwriting the existing maps of the other layer. There is something called templating that will help you keep the original maps in the layers, you can search the forum for templating / template to see how to do that.