I was trying to render 30 hairs with 200-500 children each in Cycles. I have caustics disabled. Bounces max 3, min 1. 500 samples.
Hair have basic diffuse shader only. Strand render has 10 steps. Nevertheless, Blender freezes and crashes each time I try to add randomness to childern.
Regardless what I try - GPU or CPU, result is the same.
Characteristics of my computer
i7-410HQ CPU 2.50 GHz, RAM 8 GB, Win X64
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850 , 2GB
“Steps Set the number of subdivisions of the rendered paths (the value is a power of 2). You should set this value carefully, because if you increase the render value by two you need four times more memory to render. Also the rendering is faster if you use low render values (sometimes drastically). But how low you can go with this value depends on the waviness of the hair. This means 0 steps give 1 subdivision, 1 give 2 subdivisions, 2→4, 3→8, 4→16, … n→2[SUP]n[/SUP].”
So, for the record: Steps set to 10 means 2[SUP]10[/SUP] = 1024 subdivisions = quite a lot of geometry you’re creating there. Really necessary?
I was following a tutorial on cgcookie, which had 8 steps… I tried and it looked kind of jagged (picture). That is why I cranked the steps value up. Is there any way to make hairs smoother without increasing speps?
Just in case any of the noobs was having similar problems. So I went down to 6 steps and clicked B-spline checkbox. B-spline made hair smooth and allowed to get away with less render steps:)
