Hair and fur with Krak

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
1

I am a bit of a Noob on rendering hair with krakatoa but I had some questions.

Is it possible to render hair with the krakatoa prt when I have multiple characters with hair in the scene.? From what I can tell, there is only one prt allowed in a scene so I am not sure how to change colors and so on on a per character basis.

Is there a way to do this with a single hair prt? Or can I have multiple ones at a time?

Thanks.

-Christian

2

Depends on the Hair source, and there are some smart Magma tricks you could use…

PRT Hair supports HairFarm, Ornatrix and Max Hair&Fur. Due to the “unfortunate” way the Max Hair&Fur SDK exposed its data to 3rd parties (it didn’t :wink: ), we had to hack it by using a function that saves all hair data to disk behind the scenes and then loading that data back into the PRT Hair. And since that Max Hair SDK saving function dumps every visible hair from the scene, the PRT Hair is stuck with a single world-space representation of all Max Hairs as one object.

This is not the case with the other plugins which can be handled as individual objects, e.g. one PRT Hair per HairFarm object.

So your options are:
*You could save each hair to PRT files by hiding the rest of the objects (which would be slow and not very flexible),
*You could render each hair separately and composite later (tricky if there is interaction like shadow casting or overlapping),
*You could use a Magma modifier to detect each geometry object - create an InputGeometry and pick all hair source objects, then use NearestPoint with HairRoot as Lookup point and pass the ObjectIndex to MtlIndex output. Assign a Multi/Sub-Material and your particles will be shaded according to the object they belong to!
*You could switch to a 3rd party hair solution that does not have these limitations.

When we developed PRT Hair and used it in production, we rendered HairFarm…

3

Thanks Bobo, I went with the KCM route. It worked like a charm. Thanks a lot.

Are there any plans in the future to support Maya hair/paint effects?

-Christian

4

Yes, it is on the To Do list.