Working with hair and fur on Octane for Maya

When using Maya, it’s a simple choice that you use xGen hair and fur with Arnold. However, how do you do if your rendering engine is Octane? In this article, let’s see how you can work with hair and fur on Octane for Maya.

Of course Octane for Maya support rendering hair, and this part is without converting from xGen. You don’t need to convert the hair to polygon meshes either, but rendering simplified Paint Effects strokes used for hair and other effects. Moreover, any Octane shader can render the hair.

You will need to add Octane Material to the Octane Hair Material rollout in the pfxHair transform node like the picture below. Then, you can use Octane material with Maya Hair.

This picture below shows a red Octane Material applied to Maya Paint Effects hair strokes.

You can also connect an Image texture node to Diffuse input (or any input) on the Hair material and apply it to the hair strands.

You can access the UV source parameter in the Direct Use Of Mesh UVs rollout located in the pfxhairShape node under the Octane rollout. It’s to control the Texture map’s placement and orientation across the Maya hair system.

Above is the guide for working without xGen Hair from Maya. This part is how you can work with xGen with Octane.

Octane does not natively render XGen hair. If you still want to do that, you will need the AnimWires modifier to convert the XGen Descriptions into a nHair system. After that, you should assign a Paint FX brush to the nHair system and Octane now can render.

There is another way to convert xGen descriptions to nHair, using the Guides to Curves tool in the Utilities tab. However, you should make sure that you used splines to generate xGen description.

While Octane does not render xGen hair natively, it can do that with Ornatrix hair and fur system. The Ornatrix system can render the Octane Material and Texture map orientation that’s associated with the underlying geometry.

We hope this article can help you to work with hair and fur on Octane and Maya.

If you use Octane with Maya and want to deliver quality and speed, don’t hesitate to check out iRender – the best render farm for Octane and Maya, where you can use the fastest RTX3090 card.

You can refer to this article OctaneRender and iRender Cloud Rendering: A Perfect Match to know how our servers are compatible with Octane. We have many servers from single, dual to multiple GPUs to serve your needs. If you use Octane studio, our dual RTX3090s server (4P) will be the best choice. If you use Octane enterprise, check out our multi-GPUs servers like 4/6/8 x RTX3090s, they can render your project in a lightning speed.

Moreover, iRender has other beneficial features. We have NVlink available if you want to test (contact for more details), and free transferring tool iRender drive/GPUhub sync. You can also work with our Octane license if becoming our prime customer. Let’s see some of iRender’s tests with Octane:

iRender has many other features which would help you to render faster and easier. You can create an account via this link to experience our service. And don’t hesitate to contact us via WhatsApp: (+84) 916806116 for advice and support.

Thank you & Happy Rendering!

Source: docs.otoy.com