Hair crashing

[hdace]

I’ve been having trouble with the new hair feature. I find that it often crashes Layout. I’ve been working to determine when and why. Sometimes the crash occurs after I add an mdd in “ClothFX” and then try to render.

I have observed that my system memory surges while “UPDATING SCENE IN GPUs…” as I add more hair to my character. It hits 96% (of 32 GB) making the system very slow. Then it drops again towards the end of this process. This can take ten to twenty minutes. And rendering becomes considerably slower.

Finally, I find that a strange black circle sometimes appears.

I’ve had to temporarily turn off sub-surface scattering in the characters’ skin (which is a false color in the images I’m uploading), and also turn off instancing, in order to test the hair. There is normally grass and also lots of trees.

I’ve tested in both Mac and Windows. Windows generally does not crash as often. Mac always crashes when I try to use IPR with hair. (This is on the same dual-booting computer.)

If I do continue to use the Octane hair feature, I need to know that if it is improved in the future, will it still look the same. This is a long-term project and it would be a problem if future versions of the plugin change the appearance of the hair.

My tests have been with versions 2.12.0 & 2.13.0. I haven’t seen any significant differences between them with this issue.

[juanjgon]

Usually Octane hair can have problems for two reasons: use too thick hairs, and have too short hairs or hairs with two or more vertex at the same point.

I think that you should test your scene with really thin fibers (perhaps something like 0.0001) an test what happes. If you want to send me a sample scene I could test it here.

Anyway really soon I am going to have amazing news about hair rendering in Octane

-Juanjo

[hdace]

I'm using 2-point poly chains, so thickness, I assume, is not relevant. The hairs are long, and all of the vertexes join with two or one polys. So I think there's something else going on here.

Amazing news is exactly what I was afraid of, because "game-changers" often wreak havoc on long-term projects. But of course I look forward to hearing your news anyway! And if it's soon it could still be helpful.

Thanks!

[hdace]

PS - But what's that weird black circle????