Particle System with Hair

Alright! How many damn Gigs do I need to be able to use my creatures with fur in animation? Right now, Blender’s particle System for covering entire characters in fur is a nightmare. The render times are sky high!!

And as far as I know, there are no other alternatives whatsoever to apply any form of fur to models besides this. And this is monumentally heavy on my system!

And i’m just soo fed up with it. The only thing I can use it for is to make tiny grass scenes or some small hair on Human characters. Atleast I won’t get the out of memory message or ridiculous render times in those!

So, I want to know exactly, what sort of hardware do I need to have to Cover my models with fur, or if there is an alternative, please do tell as I feel I’m losing my mind with this thing.

So, I want to know exactly, what sort of hardware do I need
What hardware do you have ?
How many particles and how many child particles are you using

Test some other models such as http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/76712

covering a creature with fur should be done in two levels: one particle system for a rough undercoat for coverage, and one particle system for the smoother longer outer coat.

I have 8GB of RAM, 1 GB of VRAM and an I5 CPU 2.33Ghz

Yes, but I assume we’re talking in the ten thousands of hair and children in use right? With around 5000 hair plus children it is already way too much.

it depends, but using a rough underlayer, means you need far fewer particles overall.

Hmm…So what are the main differences between the Inner Layer and Outer Layer? I was using almost 5 Particles System on my latest Creature because I often had the fur in places where I didn’t want them to be, even though I was using a Vertex Group. So I created various groups and one particle system for each one. Probably not smart. But the fur kept going inside he’s eyes!

For info on render times

Sheep from Cosmos Laundromat (9 different particle hair systems)
3.5GHz i5 cpu, rendered for 100 samples in 9:40 mins on cpu.




9min per frame seems quite a bit for me.

Use a decent gpu and you’ll cut that down a lot

Any recomendations? GTX980ti 6GB would be sufficient?

if your hair is sprouting in places uncontrollably just use the grooming tools ( particle edit mode on your main header ) to cull the stray hairs. once you do this, you can’t adjust your particle system much though.

It is not long at all for a realistic frame. You might need to adjust your expectations a bit, or look for other ways of cutting down the scene.