origin wrote:Well you failed to do that ;)
- hair prim in vray is extruded flat quad patch; from the look of this render and video from FMX i would guess that arnold shades 'cylinders'
well just to talk about something
From my small understanding, cylinders have a sense only for closeups. Possibly for radiosity calculations, because it's easier to find a shading normal. With classic lights, there is a well defined direction, with radiosity, "lighting direction" should be calculated separately, somehow. For final image full of tiny hairs, nobody would like a high contrast on sub-sub-sub pixel level, let's say strong highlight/reflection from cylinders, which already should be melted to one value per pixel.
But I believe the all renderers able to render hairs, already are able to combine the functions of stripes and cylinders. Another story is, when searching for hairs on internet, hair+renderman usually returns human hair and fur on animals, hair+Vray is somehow related to carpets
btw, regarding a long waiting for SI Vray, I think most of people don't know that Max has a a kind of special rendering API, which allows the developers to write the renderer 'on top' of what is called Max default scanline. This API is present from day one, also it's converted from theory to practice probably in time of Max 4, around 2001. For example, procedural textures are generated by Max, so any renderer, including viewport renderers, can use them. In Softimage, every developer should build them form sctrath. Another example is VRay ability to pull the (blazing fast) shadow maps from Max. And many more, afaik...
Great day for Softimage, finally to be integrated with something soooooo influent and popular.