Some animals

[Mathaeus]

@Pancho - What specifically did you want to address when you set out to build your own fur system?

This is total nit picking, and I'm not Pancho, obviously.
Beside what Pancho said, if comparison goes to ICE vs XSI hair, there's another advantage of system like ICE, that there is no fixed count of segments, like 15 in XSI hair. "Unit of rendering weight", generally is segment, not hair strand. For things like short fur, together with modern renderer who creates curves at render time, 3-4 segments per strand is plenty.
Yet another advantage is, that there is no need to create a 'complete' hair system, with guides, interpolation, parting and what not, together with evaluation of all that - ICE has more than enough power to just spread a tons of particles over surface, where particular particle "don't know" anything about other particles, and to draw some strands from them.

All that makes ICE, that I know, several times faster to handle than SI hair - inside mentioned conditions. When it comes to rendering, speed is almost the same, anyway. Hope Red Shift people will optimize a transfer time, sounds a bit too much.

Great work, by the way

[FXDude]

Thanks for your input Matheus! and for of course your immense contribution to all that concerns hair in Soft!

(some of the best results I've seen were either entirely or partly based on your system)

But apart from translation time, how did you find Redshift end result? It seems to (generally) be very hard to get good light sheen/distribution at glancing angles ('generally' meaning not concerning redshift in particular on that front)

At first impressions it looks like 3DLight has a number of advantages, but did you also try Arnold shaders?

cheers,

[Mathaeus]

But apart from translation time, how did you find Redshift end result? It seems to (generally) be very hard to get good light sheen/distribution at glancing angles ('generally' meaning not concerning redshift in particular on that front)

At first impressions it looks like 3DLight has a number of advantages, but did you also try Arnold shaders?

Where I live, most likely, art director will ask for 'not so exaggerated' look, exactly like Pancho did. Anyway about path tracers nowadays, I think it's still a 'half of old school' lighting, reflections only as specular shading from 'classic' lights, plus GI only on diffuse shading. More or less, while it's possible to get the ray traced reflection on hair, don't believe this is used that much.
No big deal to get the shading to be stronger by angle. Exactly in 3delight, I was able to hack the rsl code for something like that, or to get the amplified 'translucency' from back lights, but effect was somehow artificial, so result was only a new round of tweaking.
Don't know that much about Arnold, but according to public available docs, out of the box shader is a really basic one. In 3delight, even more simple shader. My wild guess, both are targeted to studios, where shader coder also comes 'out of the box'. For small story, while ago I had a chance to play with implementation of well known Renderman shader from 'Tangled' movie, it was a sort of top secret technology - in same time, Modo 601 has the same thing out of the box, imho fairly better balanced. But, I think most of Modo users don't getting this shader as something especially good.
For me, very personally, last very very good surprise is large number of ready to use shaders in Houdini, for Mantra, including the "Tangled" thing - but (again... but...) even basic shading setup, sometimes is not easy in Houdini, at least for now.
Hard to get win-win combo when it comes to hair shading for small users, that's the story

[FXDude]

I would think using traditional speculars would still be ideal, when I have a minute one of the first things I'd like to do is give hair a go at it , and ideally make one (or some) decent sample scene(s). (will probably have a few questions if you don't mind

And I recall you showing us some of your Houdini tests, and please do show us if you make others,

cheers,

[Mathaeus]

(will probably have a few questions if you don't mind

No problem.
For further, I think it is better to go to k Hair here on forum, before original poster discovers what we are doing from his thread .
Just for info, conceptually closest long hair styling solutions in another apps, are Geo to Hair Maya script , or maybe something else for Maya, likely upcoming solution for Modo, or Max's Hair Farm. Regarding Houdini, got it to work from meshes, instead from Nurbs like in SI, using only Houdini factory nodes, but it will take a while to create something streamlined. New Houdini version is very close ( if I'm correct), after all.

[FXDude]

No problem.
For further, I think it is better to go to k Hair here on forum, before original poster discovers what we are doing from his thread .

Lol yes my apologies Pancho :]

[Bullit]

There is also the new Ornatrix V3 for Max

[sheerkohf]

Amazing Work ! Keep it up ! Really inspiring !