Paintfx Doesnt Render With Mr?

[user_deleted]

I created some eyelashes and they render fine in Maya Software... but with Mental Ray they don't show up.
Did I forget to connect something?
Or tick something?
Or click something?

[duncanbrinsmead]

You need to either do convert->pfx to poly (with history) or render the pfx separately and composite.

Duncan

[user_deleted]

hmmm... ok...
converting to polys seems like a kind of heavy solution...

I don't have a problem rendering it out separately, but... I would like my eyelashes to cast shadows on my character's eyeballs, as they do in reality (shading the upper half of the eye a bit more than the lower half)...
so if I separate them out, I have to do yet another pass for the eyelashes' shadows? Isn't there a more efficient way?
(I ask not out of laziness but because I'm dealing w/ over 100 shots here, so that'll complicate the pipeline considerably)

[duncanbrinsmead]

If it is only eyelashes then it really should not be that many polys. Note that the conversion of the stroke will result in a single mesh node. Make sure that your brush converts efficiently... you want simple triangular tubes with a minimal segment count. Default eyelash pfx brushes were not designed for convert to poly so you should edit them: Set the brushType to "mesh" and make the crossSections 3, also lower the segments value as much as you can tolerate. Turning on quad output on the stroke node may also help a little.

Duncan

[sean-montgomery]

I've been seeing characters on my show whose hair was created with PaintFX, and Mental Ray crashes when trying to render it. The hair pass has to be rendered with Maya Software.

[duncanbrinsmead]

The mental ray render of hair requires that the hair be converted to segments used in a geometry shader. This can result in a lot of memory use(perhaps the cause of the crash). Paint effects, which the maya software render uses, is a post pass that renders into a depth buffer instead of raytracing. This allows it to throw away segments as they are drawn and limits the total memory hit.

Duncan