How do i render Tracer object with C4D hair shader controls?

[rodney71]

what i want to do is taper the start and end of each path/spline generated by the tracer object. I can use the Octane object tag and turn on "render as hair" and use an octane shader but the Octane hair tag doesn't give a graph to control hair thickness along the length of the curves. The c4d hair shader offers this thickness control but doesn't seem to work on a tracer object, only a hair generator. is there a way to set this up in octane?

[rodney71]

maybe not obvious is that i want to avoid setting up a sweep for memory consumption. it brings the system to a crawl.
I'd love to control the sweep size along the paths at rendertime using the tracer object.

[aoktar]

With this method you can just define root/tip thinkness. You can use to generate it as hairs and render. It will directly render the hairs without using object tag method.

[rodney71]

Octane's object tag allows root/tip thickness yes. but it doesn't allow more control to allow a thin root, fat body, thin tip.
like this image. the C4D hair shader allows this for the hair generator and Octane will render it. but I can't apply that hair shader to a tracer object. it doesn't seem to work.
so...I'm wondering if there's another way to get this control.

[boxfx]

This would be useful. When using hair as an airflow type graphic, the best I can do is use opacity to fade out the end of the spline. But then you get the fun slow render times that opacity causes in octane renders with many overlapping objects.

[rodney71]

the idea came from seeing this control in Redshift. Rendertime splines is the only way to handle this efficiently with many particles

[aoktar]

the idea came from seeing this control in Redshift. Rendertime splines is the only way to handle this efficiently with many particles

I'll add something like that if there's not really a way to convert tracer data to hairs

[rodney71]

that sounds amazing and i can't wait to test that out. thanks for commenting