In a recent forum post called ‘The KeyShot Fur and Wig Shop’, John Seymour posted his experiment with importing hair geometry and rendering it in KeyShot. If you recall some of John’s past work and his eye for detail, you know how important the lighting is to the scene. Once again, he shows just how KeyShot performs.
Rendering Hair in KeyShot
Now, you may think you’ve seen plenty of character models rendered in KeyShot using our realistic translucent skin materials. They look fabulous, but for hair John took a different approach. Instead of using translucent materials, he used ‘Metal’ with a higher than usual IOR and some custom HDR’s. The models were first exported from Cinema 4D as geometry. John explains the process.
There are pro’s and con’s of exporting hair as geometry, the pro’s being the hair is taken into account by Global Illumination and AO in KeyShot (in C4D, hair is not affected by either of these.) The con’s being the time it takes to convert to geometry and the resulting file size of the OBJ’s – for instance the Wig/Furballs are 800 MB and the Rocking Sheep is 1.7 GB. The Wig/Furball has 80,000 individual hairs, the Rocking Sheep has over 200,000. I think KeyShot does a fantastic job at rendering it realistically.
We think so too. KeyShot is also able to handle large file imports. The floating wig above rendered up in real-time in about five minutes. Have you used KeyShot to render realistic looking hair? What materials and lighting are your favorites to use?
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