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Hair

Rendering scenes with hair

The final stage in adding hair to your models is to render the scene. You can render hair using the Maya Software renderer or the mental ray for Maya renderer.

Related topics

	Set up hair shading
	Set up hair self-shadowing
	Render scenes with hair

More about rendering hair in mental ray

To render in mental ray, ensure the Render Fur/Hair attribute is turned on in the Features section of the mental ray tab in the Render Settings window. Use the mayahair.mi shader to change render settings.

You can also use the new ProductionRapidHair Quality Preset when rendering hair in mental ray (Render Settings window, mental ray tab). Alternatively, you can use the new ProductionFineTrace Quality Preset as a starting point if you want to trace fur or hair in reflections.

For more information about rendering in mental ray, see mental ray for Maya renderer and Render Settings: mental ray tab in the Rendering guide.

Rendering hair in the Maya software renderer vs. mental ray for Maya

Refer to the following table for the differences between rendering hair in the Maya software renderer and mental ray for Maya.

Note The way that lighting and shading is calculated on Hair is slightly different between the native Maya renderer and mental ray and therefore the resulting renders will differ slightly in this respect; in both cases, an illumination model known as Kayija/Kay is used, but the intensity at a given point is calculated in Hair’s own model for the native renderer, and in mental ray core for the mental ray renderer. This intensity is then used in the Kayija/Kay illumination model to calculate diffuse/specular components.

Hair item	Maya software renderer	mental ray for Maya
Shading	Brighter	A bit darker
Support for correct DOF composition	Not accurate	Yes
Support for Motion Blur	3D only	Yes
Hair integrated into scene	As a post process via z-depth composite	Fully integrated
Support for raytraced shadows	No	Yes
Support for depth map shadows	Yes	Yes
Support for texture-mapped lights	No	No
Rendering quality	Hairs that are thin relative to the pixel size appear disproportionately thick.	mental ray renders even thin hair more accurately with high sample count