Hair Mesh Material on Cycles

Any of you guys still use mesh for hair instead of particles? how do you guys set up your material nodes, I’m happy with mine but it took quite a bit of time (27minutes of 2 GTX970 @ 1000 samples) any ideas on how to set up the nodes to reduce the render time drastically?


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I use stand hair as I’m using daz models but I just let them as the importer set them.

I will try your node setup as soon as I can. :smiley:

I actualy never looked at the hair nodes as they are pretty good out of the exporter.

Once claened of dupli node and other nodes than change nothing ( like multiply by one) that are probably there for easier tweaking that I never used the node setup look like it.


I have some doubt on the usefulness of subsurface scatering on strand hair but it’s hard to be sure before I try to compare with and without it.

I tested the node setup, rendered time go down from 27minutes to 7 minutes and 30 seconds (1000 samples). What do you think?


Very nice! :slight_smile: You could in place of the subsurface scattering or diffuse use a translucent. Not sure if would look better or not though.

I think the non sss and the sss verssion has both some advantage but I m laking the world to describe it in english. Basicaly you loose some definintion of the hair with the SSS, but your node setup make them look smoother and slightly better all in all.

I’m not sure if it’s worth the time. It may depend on how close your camera is in fact. SSS Better for portrait like this but not in a scene where you will see the full character as the diference may be lost on smaller object ( hair).

If we can have both the speed and smoothness with using translucent it will be even better of course.

I’m actually trying to do an animation, if I can’t find the solution to reduce render time then I guess I should use the nodes you provide on full body shots but when close up change my original nodes setup

I’ve actually tried with translucent, it does mellows out the shadow and edges of the planes like SSS but it suffers a huge loss over details (the hair shading looks more like a plane instead of strands). I’ll try out some other combination of nodes, will post up result later

Could you tell me how to actually make the texture and get that uneven realistic edge? I have a polygon wig now I just need to texture it. Do I need a bump map?