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There has been some discussion about getting nice looking highlights over at the DAZ forums. I came up with what I think is a nice looking shine to the hair, using Octane's Glossy with Index 1.3, Specular 1.0 and Roughness 0.2. Sighman, I wonder if it would be possible to adjust the auto-shader conversion specifically for hair so that it is possible to get a similar result from the default Carrara Hair shader? That would make things easier and more intuitive.

P.S. I assume the breakthrough came as a result of talking to Philemo? I pointed him in your direction as I knew that it would be of interest! This is placing Carrara much higher in the pecking order of Octane plugins (in my view at least!).

PhilW wrote:

Sighman wrote:

PhilW wrote:This might sound like a strange thing to do, but if I duplicate a hair and change the shader settings for one of them, Octane always seems to pick up the same colours for both hairs, so this seems like a bug, probably based on assuming that I would only be using one hair per model.

As far as I can tell this is a Carrara issue with Ctrl-D copies of the hair. They look the same in the assembly room and the Carrara native renderer but they seem to render properly in the Octane viewport. I assume you have created separate master shaders for each hair model.

Hi Sighman, If I duplicate and then add a new blue hair shader to the copy, the Assemble Room preview correctly shows the blue hair along with the original colour hair. But when I render in Octane, they are both blue! That is the issue. So kind of the opposite of what you said.

I need the exact steps you are taking to reproduce this issue. There are so many ways to do the same thing I want to make sure I am duplicating what you are doing.

PhilW wrote:There has been some discussion about getting nice looking highlights over at the DAZ forums. I came up with what I think is a nice looking shine to the hair, using Octane's Glossy with Index 1.3, Specular 1.0 and Roughness 0.2. Sighman, I wonder if it would be possible to adjust the auto-shader conversion specifically for hair so that it is possible to get a similar result from the default Carrara Hair shader? That would make things easier and more intuitive.

P.S. I assume the breakthrough came as a result of talking to Philemo? I pointed him in your direction as I knew that it would be of interest! This is placing Carrara much higher in the pecking order of Octane plugins (in my view at least!).

I was just waiting for someone to come up with the right numbers. I will update the plugin for the next drop. I was hoping this would drum up some new interest...

And yes, Philemo deserves full credit for pointing me to the Renderables interface.

Now if only I could find a way to render metaballs...

Sighman wrote:

PhilW wrote:

Sighman wrote:As far as I can tell this is a Carrara issue with Ctrl-D copies of the hair. They look the same in the assembly room and the Carrara native renderer but they seem to render properly in the Octane viewport. I assume you have created separate master shaders for each hair model.

Hi Sighman, If I duplicate and then add a new blue hair shader to the copy, the Assemble Room preview correctly shows the blue hair along with the original colour hair. But when I render in Octane, they are both blue! That is the issue. So kind of the opposite of what you said.

I need the exact steps you are taking to reproduce this issue. There are so many ways to do the same thing I want to make sure I am duplicating what you are doing.

I was doing a step by step instruction to replicate this issue, and it now rendered as expected in Octane! So ignore this point unless I can get it again. Sorry for the diversion. After duplicating I tend to reduce the number of hairs in the duplicate, which prompts a popup to create a new master object.

Sighman wrote:

PhilW wrote:There has been some discussion about getting nice looking highlights over at the DAZ forums. I came up with what I think is a nice looking shine to the hair, using Octane's Glossy with Index 1.3, Specular 1.0 and Roughness 0.2. Sighman, I wonder if it would be possible to adjust the auto-shader conversion specifically for hair so that it is possible to get a similar result from the default Carrara Hair shader? That would make things easier and more intuitive.

P.S. I assume the breakthrough came as a result of talking to Philemo? I pointed him in your direction as I knew that it would be of interest! This is placing Carrara much higher in the pecking order of Octane plugins (in my view at least!).

I was just waiting for someone to come up with the right numbers. I will update the plugin for the next drop. I was hoping this would drum up some new interest...

And yes, Philemo deserves full credit for pointing me to the Renderables interface.

Now if only I could find a way to render metaballs...

As my tests used Specular set to 1.0, you can use the Index figure to increase and decrease the amount of shine, and the Roughness to change the Spread of the shine (lower roughness = tighter shine area).

Did I say how much I am loving having Carrara Hair rendering in Octane!!

PhilW wrote:Did I say how much I am loving having Carrara Hair rendering in Octane!!

Amazing.

So is that what you mean by duplicating the hair prop? It looks like there are two hair colors in there, or is that just lighting?

Sighman wrote:

PhilW wrote:Did I say how much I am loving having Carrara Hair rendering in Octane!!

Amazing.

So is that what you mean by duplicating the hair prop? It looks like there are two hair colors in there, or is that just lighting?

Yes, the second hair is a dup of the first, reduce the number of hairs, lighten it a little and add some frizz to create flyaways. I used to do it in Carrara but it always produced artifacts, so I always needed to render both with and without the second hair and combine them in Photoshop. But Octane is handling it flawlessly. Actually I think the second colour in this is a little too light so it doesn't blend as well as it should. But you can envisage using perhaps several copies to get some natural colour variations going - until you get the UV mapping thing sorted out of course!

Sighman,

Thanks so much for this update. I am playing with it right now. I have a couple of general questions regarding hair not specific to this update.

Ideally, the more options the better especially when it comes to keeping Carrara competitive in the CG market. I am not experienced at all with Carrara hair, but it looks pretty good in Phil's uploads. I will indeed learn it, but I am certain it has limitations. That's why I am curious about Octane's native hair system. Ideally, it would be nice if there was an "Octane Primitive Hair Object" that allowed for Carrara users to access Octane's hair solution from within the OR4C plug-in. Having the option to use either Carrara hair or Octane hair even in combination with each other in a single scene would be awesome. Personally, the more I use OR4C the less I ever want to work in the standalone version again. So if you can find a way to make Octane Hair (and while you're at it, Octane Volumes when version 3 is released) as "primitives" that we can edit in OR4C it would mean there would no significant features from the stand alone that weren't accessible in some indirect way through the plug-in.

For example, the LuxCore Implementation has a list of LuxCore primitives which are listed under the Insert Tab. They are completely ignored by the native render engine and are only recognized by the LuxCore API. That is unless you have an even better idea for how you will give us access to the various types of volumetric primitives they pan to release before the end of the year.

You are a miracle worker Sighman, so please keep it up.

Rashad, The hair primitive type in Octane is nothing more than interpreting a line of two point polys that have no volume, and using thickness parameters to render that as a strand of hair (or fur, or in fact any cylindrical fibre). It does not have a complete hair system, any more than it has a modelling system. It just renders what it is given. And so using Carrara hair is going to be the best way to access the Octane hair primitives, unless you want to go to the vertex modeller and model hair individual strand by individual strand! Actually even then, Carrara has no internal concept of a two point poly with no volume, so even this would need a significant development. Rest assured that Carrara Hair is the best solution to access Octane Hairs and you are not missing some wonderful hair system in Octane.