Hair Suddenly Stopped Casting Shadows

[gregs]

Can anyone think what I might have done? It was working fine and then ... no depth map shadows on hair in the Maya Software renderer. I don't know what I can have changed.

Could it be a bug? An installation issue?

I had a Maya 8.5 scene with just hair, and then I imported a rigged polygonal character from an older version of Maya. As far as I know that's when it stopped working.

Any suggestions? Something simple and stupid?

[christopher-richard-bernal]

I am not too familiar with Fur, but I would check the render globals, double check hair and light settings.

On the previous project I worked on, seemingly random things can cause other things to turn off.

[duncanbrinsmead]

There was a bug in 8.5 where shadows did not appear for hair. You can workaround it by creating any simple paint effects stroke in the scene with "cast shadows" ON. The stroke can be hidden, but it will force the shadow map to do a pfx pass which will include the hair( which is rendered as pfx ).

This bug is fixed in the the 8.5 service pack 1.
Note also that 8.5 has fixes for self shadowing with mid dist maps, so if you have mid dist maps enabled on the the light then you may now see more self shadowing than before. (before 8.5 the advice was to disable mid dist shadow maps with pfx and hair)

Duncan