What are your experiences with hair rendering in vs. 2.x?

[justavisitor]

What are your experiences with hair rendering in OctaneRender for Blender 2.x? Any examples?

Also, are there any tutorials out there?

I ask because I'm going to update my version 1.2 and I'd like to know if I should choose 1.55 or the latest version.

[Elonius]

Hello,

Hair rendering in Octane Blender is great. It's pretty much like Cycles but a lot faster, setting it up is pretty much the same just remember to set Object Data to Scatter. CGCookie has a hair tutorial if you are interested that you could translate to OctaneBlender (That's what I did).

[justavisitor]

Thank you very much - this really, really looks great (and certainly nothing like Cycles)!

I just updated to vs. 2 so I'll try some of my old Cycles-hair projects and see how they work out.

EDIT: Whoa, I just tried an old hair project: Cycles = 10.56 seconds, Octane = 18 seconds (and it looks really weird).

Blender and the NVIDIA driver crash if I change the Octane Hair Settings/Thickness, and Windows has to be restarted.

[justavisitor]

Hello,

Hair rendering in Octane Blender is great. It's pretty much like Cycles but a lot faster, setting it up is pretty much the same just remember to set Object Data to Scatter. CGCookie has a hair tutorial if you are interested that you could translate to OctaneBlender (That's what I did).

Did you touch the Octane Render hair settings (thickness)?

Blender and the NVIDIA driver crashes when I do that.

[mib2berlin]

Hi, can you add a testfile?
Have no time to setup one but can test if it crash on Linux too.

Cheers, mib

[justavisitor]

Hi mib, thank you for your reply.

The project is not mine alone so I'm afraid I can't send it. But hair that looks fluffy in the Cycles version kind of 'melt' together in rubber-like blobs in Octane. And it takes longer to render in Octane (and I did check GPU twice in Blender.)...

As for speed - here are two renders of another file, one in Cycles and one in Octane:

[Cycles, above = 4.85 sec. Octane, below = 9.80 sec.]

[justavisitor]

OK, here's why my Cycles hair projects looked so bad in Octane:

Hair tips were not set to zero for several hair systems - and I didn't use Path Tracing. I don't prefer it for most purposes, but it's fantastic on hair.

Octane hair rendering is still slow on my system, compared to Cycles, but Path Tracing definitely makes it worth while!